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Graphics
Ever played Counter-Strike on PC? This game reminds me of that, but with Cowboy hats… and worse at times. Dead Man's Hand is chock full of low-res textures, low poly count models, and terrible particle effects. Wait a second everyone, I need a tissue, my eyes…have started to bleed.
::5 min later::
Excellent - I can see again, at least well enough to finish this review. I was telling you about the horrid graphics before I was interrupted, but there is more to the story. The framerate in Dead Man's Hand is the worst I’ve seen since Omikron for Dreamcast. The game will slow down to literally five frames per second and stay that way for a while, and do it without any reason. The screen can be completely empty aside from a simple building, and the game will suddenly start chugging along as if this were Doom 3 being run on a Pentium 333 - its insane!
Sound
The sound isn’t really any better. The game outputs in Dolby 5.1, but there is zero separation. It doesn’t matter what direction you're facing - the audio is pretty much always the same, and coming from the same direction. You can even hear people speaking clearly when they are so far in the distance you can't even really see them. It doesn’t make any sense to me, and it won’t to you, either.
The voice work is amazingly not that bad. Trust me, it’s nothing special. We have all heard far better and far worse, but that’s about it. Everything else is just a big mess of remixed compressed sounds. Audio this bad belongs on SNES.
Gameplay
Yes, you can move - not easily, but you can. The framerate makes movement incredibly hard at times, but even when it’s moving at the30 fps you'd expect (which is rare), the game is very twitchy. They give you all sorts of objects to shoot which are supposed to explode. The problem is that it’s not only hard to shoot them, but that most often they don’t explode! Last time I checked, a shotgun blast at point blank range should blow up a watermelon. It shouldn’t take two to three shots, but it does for some reason. This leads me to my next gripe - whoever coded the damage system should be forced to play this for all eternity. One would think that a shotgun blast to the head would kill someone, and to be honest, it sometimes does. Of course, more often than not, you will find someone who just doesn’t want to die. The 1st shot might stun them (what!?), and then the 5th will bring them down. Requiring five shotgun blasts to the head at point blank range is a bit excessive for a game that is supposed to be more realistic than arcade isn’t it?
Mission structure is just as bad as everything else; you start a level and you run straight through, shoot random objects for points, kill some guys and maybe some hookers, and that’s it. There really isn’t a point to any mission aside from running through it - I haven’t played a game this linear since the Commodore 64 was "cool." Considering the fact that it never really was, take that however you want.
The game does support Xbox Live, it is four player… and laggy… and boring. Not much more needs to be said about it, either. To be honest, there isn’t really a reason to bother with this game's XBL mode. I checked, and I waited, and checked again all through the two days I spent forcing myself to play, and I didn’t see a single match being played. I even hosted a server for an hour with no luck.
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This game is bad - avoid it at all costs. This isn’t even one of those games you play to see how bad it really is and have a laugh with some friends - it’s just a nightmare.
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