The easiest way to describe Gunman Taco Truck is something like a verse Oregon Trail only after the apocalypse. Instead of going west, you are going North/North East. Instead of hunting for your food you are shooting mutants to feed to hungry taco loving truck stop inhabitants. Also, the first several times the game is played you are probably going to die. A lot!
There is a weird mix of classic DOS gameplay and tongue-in-cheek humorous nods to video games during the play. Each element of the game is simple; the road is three lanes that contain oncoming enemies that must be defeated before reaching the player—and each will drop an item ranging from meat to make into mutant meat tacos, to scrap used to upgrade the titular truck—or the taco’s that start simple enough with three versions and quickly grow in number and complexity as the game progresses. Gunman finds a weird way to fill a strange retro game itch that most people probably didn’t even know they had.
That said, the game also has the difficulty of a retro game; it is happy to explain some of the most basic mechanics, but after that the player is very much on their own. At times it almost feels like there is a right way and a very much wrong way to play the game, and the only path to figuring that out is through repeated trial and error—something that once again goes to this strange sense of time and place for DOS era games where the only real value that could be garnered out of something was through challenge and not length.
Oddly, even though the game is difficult, and unforgiving at times, each failed attempt is only about half an hour long, for a good run, prompting the promise of doing better next time. Most failures also feel like the players poor choices for upgrades or router choices, and not the game for simply being entirely impossible. There are difficulty spikes, such as encountering a new enemy or the first time a boss is encountered, but they seem to appear at almost predictable intervals, so they can almost be counted on to end a run the first time, then after that have patterns learned and worked with from there.
Gunman Taco Truck is a low-cost game, as it is 5 dollars right now on Steam and there is not a sale going on. It is very much worth every penny that they are asking for it. There isn’t really a fence to sit on if you like old games or not, as much as the game simply comes down to owning a computer and simply enjoying something that is pretty much just stupid fun to its core. Gunman Taco Truck is probably one of the few games that will happily sit on my steam list and see random play once a month just for a quick smile, simply because it is worth it. It is also made by the same guy who made the original Doom.
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