I was interested in what’s been called “Wild West Hotline Miami” in some circles pretty much as soon as I saw the concept art. Thus, after it was able to scrape through its kickstarter, I picked it up on the release sale. While HM has some issues (and I haven’t gotten around to playing the second one through yet, as of writing this), I can remember myself and a friend I was still with for a weekend giggling at the frenetic pace and unforgiving gameplay. We need more entries into the “you can be one-shot just like your enemies” sub-genre, because it produces some hilarious moments while also presenting different challenges than your typical shooters. Or even your typical top-down game.

So that’s the appeal for me coming in. I didn’t want a copy of Hotline Miami, but I was happy to see someone else trying to expand on HM’s formula. And, indeed, there are many similarities. While “12 is Better Than 6” has it’s own distinctive differences, I submit that if you enjoyed the gameplay of HM–and what I’ve seen of its sequel–you’ll like this title as well. Games like these are the rare single-player experiences where you’ll die so often–and so quickly–that it’s nearly impossible to get frustrated at having to reboot a level. It’s a funny balance that feels like it’s come so far back around from the typical ideas about how to avoid frustrating the player–while still providing a challenge–that it ends up working quite well.

Having said all that about how 12iBT6 relates to other games…if you haven’t played Hotline Miami, you’ll probably want to know that this game is a top-down shooter with a fast pace where part of the fun is that you can only sustain about as much damage as your opponents. Since that appears to be almost universally somewhere between 1 and 2 bullet or knife wounds, you can probably imagine why the game’s pace is so fast. Enemies will quickly react to a series of gunshots, so once you go loud, you’re in for a ridiculously intense gun battle.

The game looks pretty darn cool, even if the only color in supply appears to be red…

Unlike Hotline Miami (and quite a lot of other games) though, there’s no real storyline beyond “your are from Mexico and desire revenge for something rather vague.” Whereas the other entries in this subgenre I mentioned gave me enough hints about a story that my killing of baddies (er, or worse-than-my-characteries) seemed to be getting me closer to an ending that had a payoff. While 12 is Better Than 6 doesn’t need to be matched up against HM directly for it to be considered good, it’s fair to note that this element is pretty non-existent here. The story is very much a rather transparent means-to-an-end thus far, and doesn’t really show any signs of changing. If it does pick up at some point, I’ll amend this statement in my follow-up post(the actual review).

Funnily enough, Westerns (the movie genre, mind you) have, in many cases, chosen to run with stripped-down storylines. This works incredibly well if you have some combination of interesting characters and a compelling plot, as if there’s no real story beyond “dude wants revenge” that actually can enhance the larger-than-life framing of the famous gunfighters that you’re focusing on. This is to say, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to eschew a complex plot, especially in the movie genre that this game borrows from, but the nature of 12iBT6 doesn’t provide us with any real characters either. It’s almost all about the shooting of the guys who are shooting at you. At the point I’m at, I’ve talked to a grand total of two characters that I haven’t killed, and one that I haven’t shot. And yes, they’re all dudes and this is supposed to be in the Wild West and look, the storyline is not a strong part of the game thus far and it’s not even actually something that adds to the game even slightly so far. The only other thing I can think of is that the player character calls a lot of people that he’s shooting at “Gringo.”

Anyway, so the gameplay. Earlier I mentioned that if you’ve already played certain games that take place somewhere in Florida, you’d like this game. I believe that to be true, but there’s a couple important distinctions to make between the combat styles of the two. Hotline Miami and 12 is Better Than 6 both eschew the traditional semi-RPGdom of overhead shooters going back to, say, Shadowgrounds, in favor of a style that has the player just as vulnerable as what they’re shooting at. That’s cool, as it’s the larger part of what gives them a distinct style.

The combat, however, manages to be significantly different despite the similar basic concept for gameplay. Hotline Miami, to me, felt like a glorious union of top-down shooter, quick-twitch shooter, and a puzzle game. That last one is the one I want to highlight, because the combination of the first two elements left me with a game that I realized part of the reason I enjoyed so much was because I was given, for example, seven obstacles to get by, a bunch of possible ways to do it, and many chances to fail in either my planning or my execution. HM is so fast-paced that you’re both relying on your planning and the quick-twitch part of your brain to get through it. There are times you can get lucky or unlucky, sure, but mainly it’s a game where if you come up with a workable path from the start of the level to the finish, and manage to not miss a bunch of shots, you’ll beat the level. That’s harder than it sounds or it wouldn’t be a fun game, of course.

12 is Better Than 6 has a higher element of luck, if the same levels of trial-and-error when it comes to exploring levels (and dying, naturally). Part of the reason for this is the “cocking” mechanism, where you can’t just unload any weapon you find into the bad guys until they’re all dead. You don’t just have to reload when you’re out of bullets, you need to re-cock the gun after every shot you fire. Also, knifing people from the front doesn’t really work, so unless you’re somehow lucky enough to get a bunch of enemies with their backs to you–it hasn’t happened to me yet–all in a row, you’re not going to be mowing your way through levels simply because, even though the enemies can take a grand total of maybe two hits, you’re not going to be very good at eliminating groups quickly unless they line up.

I’m not exaggerating for effect there, actually. One of the few ways you can wipe out a group of three really quickly is by firing one bullet that goes through them all (you can also through a stick of dynamite at them but you can’t carry many of those). Otherwise, you do tend to end up playing peek-a-boo with a bunch of enemies, and it’s up to both your aim, your quickness in re-cocking, your decisions related to cover, and whether or not the Bullet Gods have blessed you with not getting hit. That last factor really does often come down to luck, since you can be pretty damn good at peek-a-boo and still get winged by one of the four enemies you’re playing it with. This “shooting at a mob of enemies while frantically ducking out from behind a bar’s table” thing tends to crop up very often if you’re not extremely stealthy (and some levels it’s totally unavoidable), and this definitely a key difference between HM and this game.

While it’s possible to cheese your way through levels sometimes, most of the gameplay is finding a way to eliminate targets that are away from the rest of the group, and then getting into frantic gunfights with the rest where part of the “quick-twitch” is actually re-cocking your weapon fast enough. Yeah, that’s strange, right? I feel like I need to give props to the devs for even making that a game mechanic that matters in the moment, rather than it just being a thing you do in-between encounters. Regardless of whether it’s prop-worthy, it means that the frenetic situations are the ones calling for using cover effectively, and ducking out to shoot the baddies when they’re reloading or exposed. This is in contrast to HM, where you basically do everything on the fly and the path you take is just as important as actually hitting the targets in front of you, as often they work out to be one and the same.

It also means that in its own way, 12 is Better Than 6 is less forgiving of the moments where you miss. Because you’ll need to re-cock, possibly duck back in and out of cover, and fire again. In that other game that I’m not playing right now, there are different, just as unforgiving mechanics. In this one, it’s that you really only get a couple of shots at an enemy before they get to you and kill you. The path you take doesn’t matter as much as the more-emergent HM games, but your accuracy matters more. So you’re more prone to dying because of simple physical errors, or the luck of whether or not a shot registers as a hit when you’re firing at the edge of a hitbox.

In terms of the audio/visual experience, the game lives up to previous iterations in the subgenre, as the hand-drawn graphics–shown above–are impressive if a tad minimalist from my taste. Whatever you prefer, though, the artistic skill was clearly there. The music is a series of twangy guitar that adds to the frantic pace of your duck-and-cover shootouts, and feels appropriate for the “wild west” setting. Both of these things can’t really be overstated, as the music in-particular adds to the experience for me.

“12 is Better Than 6” isn’t as good as Hotline Miami, in my opinion (which is based on completing about half the game so far), but it also isn’t a ripoff of that title so much as a distinctly different entry in the “oh wow I died really quickly and it was great” subgenre of top-down shooters. There are issues with some of the gameplay’s rough edges, and I wish the storyline was a thing (and that, well, the characters were a thing), but for $8.49, I feel like it’s hard to go wrong if you’re into top-down ridiculousness. Developed by Inkstain Games and published by Pinkapp Games, it’s still at the sale price (down from $10) through Friday at noon on Steam.