Secret Ponchos: Review

As an online-only twin-stick shooter, you must always leave the house with a stable, healthily populated server. Secret Ponchos’ developers know exactly where they left their stability: on the kitchen table next to the satisfying gunplay.

The game’s cleverest ideas are buried under a glut of technical niggles. could the yawning stretches of time as you wait for a match be evocative of the slow-burning westerns of Sergio leone? Well they’re not. Worse yet, i encountered game-breaking glitches in a high proportion of the games i did get into, with players warping back and forth across the screen as i tried to nail them with a revolver.

the five playable classes are satisfyingly varied offering quick-draw specialists, shotgun-wielding skeletons or speedy matadors but you’ll often find yourself with a team made up entirely of one class thanks to clumsy matchmaking. When you do find yourself in an eight-player free-for-all with every play style represented, Secret Ponchos feels nuanced and tactical. the pace is refreshingly slow you can press up against scenery, stalk about the good-looking western environments and tease your opponents into making a mistake.

On the flip side, letting loose with a volley of pistol rounds or cracking a bullwhip into an enemy’s face feels nowhere near as impactful as it should more like you’re swatting at thin air and the three uninspiring game modes on offer soon begin to wear thin. there’s some serviceable twin-stick multiplayer shooting under the cowboy fancy dress, but sadly it’s below some glaring technical problems, too.

6/10