The Gunstringer

Eventually you have to stop and ask what, exactly, does Kinect bring to this game? The answer is "not very much". It would be both more playable and more enjoyable as a traditional controller-based experience. What does Kinect take away? Timing and precision, two key ingredients of the shooting and platforming genres being mashed together. Motion control may make The Gunstringer stand out, but it doesn't make it better.

Putting another big nail in the game's promise is the slender nature of the whole enterprise. It's not just that the gameplay quickly becomes repetitive, with the same scenarios shuffled around but remaining virtually unchanged as you travel from gaudy bordello to Chinese gardens to fluorescent Mexican underworld. This is also an incredibly short game. There are twenty stages, each of which takes about five to ten minutes to play. Clearing the game in around four hours isn't just possible - it's inevitable. The urge to replay and get gold medal scores on each level is dampened by the knowledge that the drifting controls make that a somewhat random achievement.

As an Xbox Live title, brevity wouldn't have been such an issue, but The Gunstringer never feels like it earned its promotion to boxed product. It feels more like a small game surrounded by so much video and audio silliness that its file size simply ballooned beyond the limits of what was acceptable for a download.

This suspicion is compounded by the inclusion of a free code for Fruit Ninja Kinect, an equally simple yet far more successful game which understands that you need to start with an idea that works best with motion control. There's also some free DLC.

This DLC, The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles, is a good example of how Twisted Pixel's anarchic nature has run ahead of its gameplay development. Weighing in at a hefty 1.94 GB, The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles is a crude and fairly joyless spoof of infamous FMV shooter Mad Dog McCree. Filmed entirely in live action and hosted by Toxic Avenger director Lloyd Kaufman, it's a joke perpetrated on the player. There's very little gameplay - just rudimentary quick draws against enemies that pop up and take you down with a single shot - and after a few minutes I mostly felt annoyed that I'd wasted my time, bandwidth and hard drive space on such a clumsy gag.

The tragedy is that at the end of The Gunstringer, Twisted Pixel uses a similar idea to far greater effect in a gloriously silly finale that delivers the sort of meta-textual playfulness sorely missing from the preceding few hours of clunky jumping and shooting.

It's hard to know what to make of The Gunstringer. Any retail game that comes packed with two substantial freebies (one good, one stupid) clearly has self-worth issues, but the effort and expense that went into a self-indulgent in-joke like Wavy Tube Man would have been better directed making The Gunstringer more interesting, more playable and more than an afternoon's slightly irritating distraction. Instead, the best stuff in the game is conceptual or consigned to the margins, leaving the actual gameplay as an awkward vestigial thing to be plodded through while you wait for more funny stuff.

It's sometimes hard to criticise Twisted Pixel's output as the developers put so much of themselves, literally, into their games. At times, the self-awareness works. Just as I was thinking, "This is really nothing more than Duck Hunt for Kinect," along comes a perfectly timed Duck Hunt joke to undercut the criticism. Point taken.

I've liked or loved everything the studio's done so far, but this is the first Twisted Pixel offering where I've really struggled to find the positives. It's short, shallow and repetitive, and where humour might elevate the experience, the pointless and clunky motion controls drag it down again. Whether Twisted Pixel is more at home in the digital download arena, more comfortable with traditional controllers or simply more interested in making silly films, The Gunstringer represents the first real disappointment from one of gaming's most distinctive developers.