Dead Man's Hand Hands-On Impressions

At Atari's recent press event, we briefly played a new build of Dead Man's Hand, a Wild West shooter for the Xbox in development at Human Head Studios. Producer Jay King gave us a lively demonstration of the game and explained some of the mechanics and other elements in detail. In addition to the atypical setting for the game, Dead Man's Hand is also incorporating some things into its gameplay that you might not expect to find in a first-person shooter.

Few games these days maintain a truly arcade-style feel, and even fewer of them are FPS games, but Dead Man's Hand's design incorporates a lot of classic arcade elements. You'll have a score displayed on your HUD at all times, and when you blast enemies, you'll actually see a number indicating the points scored floating up from their corpse. Those wiley varmints aren't the only thing that will generate points, though--just about everything in the environment can be blasted, from hanging signs and lanterns to lean-tos and wagons, and they all give you points. You can even raise your score further by effectively creating combos. When you shoot one enemy or object, a bar at the bottom of the screen begins to fill, and the more things you shoot in quick succession, the further the bar will fill. Anything you shoot while this bar is somewhat full will be considered part of a chain combo, and you'll gain an appropriate bonus to your score. You'll also build up "juice" when you kill enemies, which can be applied toward a special fire mode that varies depending on your weapon. You can fan your shots with a revolver, for instance, or fire both barrels of your rifle when you hit the alternate fire.

As we've reported previously, Dead Man's Hand follows a man known as El Tejon, a former gunslinger whose bloodthirsty gang betrayed him and left him for dead. As the game opens, you'll take control of El Tejon as he escapes from a Mexican jail cell and, thirsty for revenge, begins to hunt down each of the nine members of his former gang. The game will feature a large number of missions, and the nine gang members will of course appear as boss characters, each of which is characterized by the kind of weapon he'll fight you with. One prefers knives, for instance, while another will even attack with a cannon. In addition to the main levels that have you chasing down your former compadres, you'll be able to embark on optional side levels that have you doing some good deeds, such as stopping a ruthless bandit who's terrorizing a small town. These side missions aren't required, but they do let you feel more like a hero and allow you to rack up higher scores.

Since Dead Man's Hand is built on the Xbox version of the Unreal engine, it uses the Karma physics engine to pretty impressive effect. The character models flail around nicely when you take them out--they'll keel over backward if you hit them with a six-gun, but a 12-gauge blast at close range will send them positively flying backward. Just about everything in the environment reacts to your shots and other explosions physically, too--we shot out one leg of a lean-to at one point, which collapsed on and killed an enemy. King showed us a scene where firing at a barrel of gunpowder would send a wagon rolling down a hill. The rampant use of physics in the game seems to make the action and environments feel a lot more alive than they would otherwise.

Like you'd expect out of any good FPS on the Xbox, Dead Man's Hand will make full use of Xbox Live. In addition to the expected deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, multiplayer Dead Man's Hand will feature two unique modes: bounty and posse. In bounty, one player becomes a mark, and all of the other players will attempt to hunt down the bounty for greater reward. King said to remember the Alamo when envisioning the way the posse mode works--you'll hole up with several friends and fight off wave after wave of incoming AI bandits.

Dead Man's Hand looks to be a pretty unique and entertaining entry into the FPS genre. Amid hordes of space marines and assault rifle-clutching terrorists, it's nice to see a shooter set in a less common milieu, and aside from the old LucasArts game Outlaws, Dead Man's Hand is pretty unique in its use of the Wild West. The game is scheduled for release this winter, and we'll bring you more on it soon.