Round up a friend and do some two-player bounty huntin' in the Wild West.
If you play on the hard difficulty setting, the bosses (especially Chief Wigwam and Sir Richard Rose) will destroy you again and again. In order to remain calm and prevent yourself from hammer-fisting your SNES, you might have to take a break. But you’ll soon be playing again, determined to show these honchos what a tough hombre you really are.
As you spend time playing the game, you’ll constantly discover better ways to evade attacks and kill enemies. And you’ll eventually find the extra life that’s hidden behind a tree in stage seven. And you’ll realize that you don’t have to stay on the ground to shoot the boss Dark Horse; instead, you can jump up to the second-floor balcony, a much better position, and barrage him with bullets from there. Through making these kinds of little discoveries, you’ll gradually improve, and this gradual progression is what makes this simple game so addicting. Granted, if you’re playing on the easy difficulty setting, you won’t need much practice to beat the game, but if you’re playing on hard, you’ll need all the help you can get.
Sunset Riders derives some of its charm and distinct personality from its goofy voice acting. Each boss has a different catch phrase. Dark Horse eloquently states, “You in heap big trouble!” And the boss Paco Loco, who is seemingly as well-educated as Dark Horse, shouts “Hasta la bye-bye” before dying. The game also derives its charm from the campy Western theme and the Saturday-morning-cartoon feel. And who doesn’t love shooting up a saloon to help some dancing harlots?
I have only two (very minor) complaints about Sunset Riders. Chief Wigwam is the most frustrating boss in the game. Even after you become familiar with his attack patterns, he’ll still kill you. If you can dodge about 50 of his throwing knives and finally subdue him, you won’t get the satisfaction of smiling down on his corpse. Instead, his sister appears and begs you not to kill him, and you graciously agree. Nonsense! Chief Wigwam must die. Let me step on his neck, burn his eye with the red-hot barrel of my six-shooter, then lodge a bullet in his brain.
My second complaint involves the amount of time you’re invincible when you respawn. When you respawn in Contra (NES), for instance, you’re invincible for an adequate amount of time—long enough to move out of harm’s way. This isn’t the case in Sunset Riders. Even after playing the game for a few hours, I couldn’t get used to the too-short time of post-respawn invincibility.
Don’t focus on these two complaints, though. They hardly create a blemish on this SNES gem. “You in heap big trouble” if you don’t own this game.