Dead Man’s Hand is a conventional first-person shooter, so if you’ve played one of the countless number of similar such games in the past few years, you’ll have no trouble picking it right up. The game features a fairly brief single-player campaign, playable on three different difficulty levels, and an online multiplayer mode for up to eight players. Online play includes your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, as well as a mode called bounty, in which one particular player becomes the target of everyone else, and another mode called posse, in which players join forces to hold their position against waves of computer-controlled bad guys.
There aren’t many multiplayer maps to choose from (especially for posse mode), though what’s more problematic is the overall feel of the action. There’s little discernible feedback for when you’re taking damage, and hit detection is generally flaky, making the core multiplayer gameplay rather unsatisfying. One way of squeezing a little value out of the game’s multiplayer features is to start a “posse” session all by yourself, if you just want to shoot at some targets. That may be your best bet, as after several days’ worth of attempts, we encountered only a handful of players running about in Dead Man’s Hand’s multiplayer offering.
The single-player portion of Dead Man’s Hand casts you as El Tejón, a Mexican outlaw who’s been double-crossed by his gang. You’ll guide El Tejón through a linear series of missions (there are some optional bonus missions along the way) in which he’ll track down and take revenge on his former allies one by one. For the most part, these are straightforward, by-the-numbers first-person shooter levels. They’re all relatively short and noticeably scripted, meaning you can expect your enemies to pop out from exactly the same spots each time you play each mission. And, at least at the default difficulty, you’ll often need to retry missions a few times, because it’s quite possible to instantly get killed in many situations, such as by standing in the vicinity of a powder keg when it goes off. You’ll also sometimes lose a great deal of health trying to shoot foes that, due to the game’s somewhat flaky hit detection, you just won’t be able to hit (though, for what it’s worth, this problem isn’t nearly as severe as in the Xbox version). Your occasional showdowns with boss opponents will yield mixed results, too. Some of them are tough, while others are total wimps just waiting to get shot full of lead.
