Shotgun Legend - A Fun little Retro Action game.

This is a game where you play as a redneck with a shotgun who got sucked into a wormhole. To get home, you must collect the pieces of your shattered rim. Here you have the premise for the plot of Shotgun Legend, with a bit of silly backstory you can discover about the world as you play through. It takes a lot of inspiration from the original Legend of Zelda, playing a top-down action game with little direction given and a focus on exploration and discovery. Also a shotgun as a weapon.

While not as good as Legend of Zelda, the game does manage to capture the things that made the original Zelda game fun. There are a lot of hidden areas to discover, power-ups to find, and a total of ten dungeons to clear before the final boss. The game does look like it would belong on the NES and manages to avoid looking overly pixilated like you tend to see with other retro-style indie games.

There are some key additions to combat that change the game up from its inspiration, and the main one is the main attack being a shotgun instead of a sword. It has a spread, and the more pellets hit your opponent, the more damage is done. This means the closer you are, the stronger the attack. You also have a tool you hold in your second hand that can be used, usually in limited quantities. TNT, crossbow, and a few others. The shotgun has a short reload between shots, and both your tool and shotgun can be used simultaneously. Makes for some fun and fast-paced combat, and all things considered, a good variety of enemies considering the games five dollar price point.

Judging by a few comments on the steam page for it, the game's difficulty seems to vary a bit. Some people were talking about a high difficulty spike around dungeon three, whereas I had little trouble with any of the game's bosses up until the final one. That guy kicked my butt a good number of times, I was thrown off by the sudden up in difficulty compared to the rest of the game. So how hard a boss is can vary from person to person here, but overall it's not one of the more difficult games. Though most of the game manages to offer enough of a challenge to keep you on your toes, which is enough for me.

The only real issue I had is the controls feel like they would handle much nicer with a typical D-pad than the touch-sensitive pad or joystick on the steam controller, but this is something that may just be down to personal preference. Even with the steam controller the game handled smooth enough that it's not something that ever caused a big issue.

And while I'm not really interested in the optional multiplayer of calling in a friend to play with, or the 'hardcore mode' which is a play through that ends after one death and no saves, they are nice features to add a bit more to the game, and take nothing away from the experience to include.

It's not a game that does anything to really elevate itself above its inspiration but does enough to distinguish itself as it's own entity. It's a game that knows what it wants to be and does what it does well. If you like old school Zelda games, and like the premise of this title, it's worth picking up.