It’s all about shooting, naturally. You are a poncho-wearing Clint Eastwood clone who scurries about, taking cover behind a wagon or boulder, besting bad guys with your six-shooter or rifle. Invoking Dead-Eye mode turns the screen black-and-white while you target several places on the same enemy in slow motion, and there are gripping quick-draw duels, the tension of which is heightened by an innovative control system.
True to its twitchy arcade style, Red Dead Revolver eschews leisurely exploration. The set pieces are impressive, whether fighting bandits atop a train or orchestrating explosive mayhem on an impressively realised civil-war battlefield. Other playable characters include Annie Stoakes, who, in one of the game’s most enjoyable sequences, whips out her shotgun and mounts a buffalo. Not all levels are satisfying, however — a saloon brawl feels clumsy — and it is annoying to see your character suicidally break cover without being told to, and stand there taking bullets.
Red Dead Revolver doesn’t achieve consistent excellence, but it drips with style.
For this little-exploited genre, it’s the fastest gun in the west. Four stars
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Steven Poole
Shrek 2
GameCube, PS2, Xbox, £39.99; PC, £29.99; all ages
The first Shrek game was a donkey — by which
I mean that it stank, rather than that it entertained like Eddie Murphy's wisecracking character in the film. This second attempt is immeasurably better, if only because it looks like a quality product rather than something cobbled together in a lunch break. In this puzzle-solving adventure, you control four characters simultaneously, applying each one's strengths where appropriate: Shrek is good for battering opponents, Donkey for kicking down doors, Princess Fiona for her ability to slow down time. A choice of talented fairy celebs can be chosen to make up your quartet. The four characters have an annoying habit of getting under each other's feet, but all are authentically animated and voiced. The varied levels are imaginatively constructed, but inspiration must have run short when it came to designing the puzzles — many are repetitive, and the best ideas are shamelessly plundered from elsewhere. Mildly entertaining, but not in the same league as the films. Three stars
Barry Collins
Gorky Zero: Beyond Honor
PC, 19.99, ages 12+
Not many games come out of Poland — and even fewer are any good — but Gorky Zero: Beyond Honor, despite the appalling American spelling, is a rather compelling tactical stealth shooter that mixes first- and third-person action. You play Cole Sullivan, a special-forces operative working for a black-ops section of the UN. Your task is to infiltrate a former Soviet experimental lab that has perfected the art of zombie production and is in the process of assembling an army of the undead. You start off prowling around the various levels in a top-down isometric view; when the combat starts, you slip into a more traditional first-person perspective. The character's lack of jumping and climbing abilities hamper your attempts to manoeuvre around the well-drawn environments, but the game is graphically slick. With a price tag of less than £20, this is a polished bargain. Three stars
Daniel Emery