Hired Guns

In the comments of his look back at Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Rik proclaimed he would never be reviewing the somewhat similar-looking game Hired Guns. I knew nothing about Hired Guns, but I pounded my desk and immediately thought, “I know an asshole who WILL!”

Hired Guns is best known as an Amiga game, for good reasons. This DOS port is merely functional. There are fewer sound effects and they all sound worse. A status bar no longer shows text notifications or quips from team members. Music is almost entirely removed. If anything you read here sounds interesting, you’ll probably want the Amiga version instead. Especially since, in 2026, you’re surely emulating and have a choice.

At its core, Hired Guns is a 1993 attempt to have first-person multiplayer on the same system. Think N64’s GoldenEye, but four years earlier and slightly more hacky. The Amiga OS could support two mice plugged in at the same time – famously used for multiplayer in Lemmings – plus two more players sharing the keyboard and/or any joypads plugged in. This gives plenty of ways for four players to crowd around one monitor and control their own character. DOS can only support one mouse and two joysticks, so this version, again, must make compromises.

Hired Guns is designed expressly as a four-player game. The screen is divided into four quadrants tracking four independent views. Each character can move, browse menus, and act simultaneously – impressive stuff for 1993. However, combinations less than four players still control 3-4 characters. Two players manage two characters each. Solo? All four. Only three players drops to three screens. You cannot customize any controls, so you’re forced into sharing preset groups of keyboard keys, or remembering modifier combos on a single button joystick. Solo players can only use the mouse, which the interface seems designed for anyway.

There’s 41 levels total, but these get divided up into tutorials, “action missions,” and the full game. The 17 action missions are short scenarios with basic goals. These range from cooperatively getting all characters to the exit before time runs out, to deathmatch-like arena levels where you’re fighting and racing the other players to reach the exit first. Characters can’t respawn, so it’s hard to call it true deathmatch. Really, these levels feel like bonus content rather than anything fully-formed. They’re good for quick action, but you’ll probably want to jump straight into the full game.

The full “RPG Game” follows a coterie of twelve mercenaries and their latest contract – go to the planet Graveyard, collect four fusion cores from facilities around the planet, plug them into the generator at the spaceport to overload it, then escape before the planet detonates. See, Graveyard has been overrun by “illegal genetic experiments,” which form your deadly opposition. Your employer wants these critters iced. Nuking the planet, as you may have heard, is the only way to be sure.

The box comes with four(!) manuals, each averaging around 40 pages and covering the history of the game’s universe, glossaries on weapons and equipment, descriptions of distant planets you’ll never visit, and the backstory to each of your team’s operatives. How much use these books will be depends on how excited you are to read some middling science fiction. If you enjoy thumbing through random tales in classic sci-fi magazines, maybe there’s something here for you.

If not, almost nothing in the manuals gets referenced in the game proper. It’s all just decoration, from a bygone era when printed paper was several factors cheaper than disk space. The most useful parts – aside from the game instructions, obviously – will be the weapon descriptions and the character backstories. There’s not enough in-game text to cover exactly what each weapon can do, while all twelve characters have a unique ending wrapped up in a post-game text screen (think Twisted Metal or Mortal Kombat). It won’t mean as much if you haven’t read their story first.

You’ll pick your team from the full roster of twelve mercs. I’d say to choose wisely, but this doesn’t actually apply. Despite descriptions like “Medic” or “Marksman,” characters aren’t differentiated that way. There are no stats for accuracy, skills, or inherent weapon bonuses. There’s no ability to use medkits on others, snipe from afar, or to hack anything. XP is earned for each character, but you can’t spend it – it’s more like a high score. There’s no way for characters to be better at their listed specialties than anyone else, so you’re mostly picking who has the starting equipment you like the best.

Instead, characters have different Physical and Agility stat values. Physical is health – more of it means they can take more hits and carry more stuff – while Agility relates to fall damage. Hired Guns uses grid-based movement, but gets uniquely vertical for its time. There’s no shortage of lifts that take you up to dangerous ledges, with sheer drops to platforms below. Characters with low Agility take more damage when they fall, while falls of four or more floors are fatal for anyone.

You can also stumble into canals or entire floors filled with water. This becomes a panicked rush for a human to find a path to surface. However, three characters are robots, who don’t need to breathe. These guys can casually stroll along the sunken floors and not even worry about rust. So, while there’s no specialties, there are still roles – combat/exploration, pack mule, diver – that you’ll want to consider when building your team. The big thing to note is that dead characters stay dead. The four you choose at the start are the four you’ll have for the whole game, with no ability to swap in remaining characters from the roster. I guess the other mercs dropped you four off on the planet, then fucked off to the mall.

With four characters selected, we head to the map screen. The 19 sections of Graveyard are interconnected, with encounters getting increasingly difficult as you move closer to the spaceport. Branching paths mean you’re rarely forced to play levels in sequence, while you absolutely can return to previous ones to explore additional sections or farm more ammo – both enemies and items respawn when you return. Levels marked with a red circle house the fusion cores, so it’s easy to chart a path to your ultimate targets. It’s a nice bit of non-linearity that help this feel like a both a “real” mission and a “real” world.

Unfortunately, gameplay makes a rough first impression. As said, all players get a tiny portion of the screen to themselves and there’s no way to change this layout to look less crowded. Hunching over a keyboard, shoulder to shoulder with your buddy, squinting at your tiny screen, is going to feel awkward. Trying to remember what arbitrary key setup you’ve been assigned (like QAOP to move) may also end up a problem. Each character gets four tabs, showing stats, a minimap, and inventory, which is still restricted to their individual window. There’s barely enough real estate to get the information across – but we’ll get to that more in a bit.

As a solo player, you’re still looking at four windows while being responsible for all of them. Solo controls are strictly mouse-based, with which character you control determined by which of the screens your mouse cursor is currently within. Edges of the screens are dedicated to moving and turning, exactly like any ‘90s dungeon crawler, but the smaller area makes it much less precise. Instead of clicking around the edges, I would unintentionally click inside the screen all the time. This fires whatever gun you have equipped. Ammo is limited, so I started unequipping guns when I knew I would just be navigating around.

The characters you don’t control… do nothing. There’s no AI for your squad, only a basic “Follow” toggle that quickly falls apart if you try to get more than one character to tail you. They never act on their own. There’s no “overwatch” setting where they auto-fire on enemies that get close (even though there are plantable turrets that do this, so the code’s clearly there). They stand there, blankly, until you turn your attention back to their screen. Even if alien critters come right up to them and start attacking, they’ll just passively let their leg get chewed.

At most, you could use characters as cameras – setting them to watch certain areas and rushing your cursor to their screen if it starts flashing red. More likely, you’re going to pick one character to scout ahead and leave the rest sequestered someplace safe. Once you find a dangerous looking cliff, stop and bring up your Agility character. Lots of bad guys? Send in the Physical character armed with your biggest cannon. If you find water, send in the robot. The level won’t end until everyone’s passed through the exit, so your final task will be to walk everyone to it in turn.

Leapfrogging characters like this works well enough solo, though it’s not a great time. It feels a lot like playing a normal, one-screen dungeon crawler in a needlessly tiny window, while the other three characters are baggage you’ve got to find a safe place to set down. I’d love to see solo play use the full screen – maybe tabbing between the four views instead – but I get that every piece of art would have to be redrawn. What I really don’t understand is why solo play can’t let you use combinations of keys and mouse controls. I want to have the movement precision of the arrow keys while navigating the interface with the mouse – and it’s not like someone else is using those controls. But, I assume it’s a hard-coded limit of designing and programming the game to support multiple players.

Of course, with friends playing too, you’re all doing your own thing. Everyone’s off exploring different areas and covering the map in a fraction of the time. If one of you gets into trouble, you’re shouting for everyone to come over and help. But the co-op isn’t terribly enforced, either. I kept waiting for moments where, say, one character has to hit a timed switch so a second character can rush through a forcefield. At best, there were lifts one character could send up as a shortcut for the others, or the time I got stuck inside a sliding block puzzle and needed another character to pull a block away.

Inventory management is probably the worst part, owing to both limited controls and the small screens. You items are held in one long strip you scroll up and down through. You have to move an item to your single hand slot to identify it or to drop it into the world. There’s no way to give anything directly to other characters, so you have to drop long candy-like trails of items to trade. It’s time-consuming and kludgy, and I would have loved some hotkeys instead of clicking on shrunken buttons within that character’s screen.

Items on the ground also only show as an icon for its rough class, like a crate for a gun, or a basket for a consumable (food, health, ammo). You won’t know what it is until a character picks it up, with red-herring items like bricks existing to clog up your inventory. You can pick the object up blind with a right-click, and I found it much easier to just do this and distribute the gear in a quiet area later. It’s another point where more screen real-estate would have helped (there’s not even an ammo counter; you have to open your inventory), but again, the game is relentlessly designed for four players and the UI has been squeezed in as best it can.

Hired Guns is a pretty difficult game. Later enemies are sturdy in ways likely designed for multiple characters all shooting at once. You have no attack when you don’t have a loaded weapon, so scouring levels for ammo is critical. You can’t unload bullets, so found weapons clog your inventory until they’re used up. Health kits are pretty rare, with even fewer repair kits for the useful robots. Fusion cores are heavy items that you, indeed, must lug around for the rest of the game. Items in your inventory degrade when you take damage or spend time underwater, so there’s a real “use it or lose it” aspect as the game moves on.

You can abort to the map screen at any time, or save/reload to five different slots You’ll need to use both. Enemies behind triggered doors can refill cleared areas, and if a character ends up surrounded, that character is surely dead. You can botch pushing blocks around to make bridges and have to start the level over. It’s possible to move off a ledge and get a character stuck, with no way to pull them out. You can’t end the level without everyone who’s still alive, so now you’ve either got to reload a save, abort to the map, or blow the stuck character up with grenades. If you want to try to beat this in one go, you’re going to have quite a few restarts ahead of you.

Graphics are similar to other dungeon crawlers. Everything is grid-based with 90-degree angles. There’s general variety to the locations – jungle, alien, industrial, underground – though many art sets get reused among the levels. Repeated textures make it difficult to find visual landmarks, while you can also get that old dungeon crawler effect where corridor textures are identical and you can’t even tell you’re moving. I also had issues with the grid-based art not making it clear I was standing in front of a staircase (you can’t look up or down), but the automap can help in these situations.

Sound for DOS is compressed and rough, possibly worse than even the low-res option on the Amiga. All guns and doors sound the same, enemies make the same death noise, thunder and lighting seem to reuse a laser-blast effect that doesn’t sound right. There’s no music within the levels. Instead, you get a 1-second loop based on the level – a low “thrum” for industrial, chirping for jungle, etc. My brain would try to find patterns and eventually came up with lyrics for them. This is one of the few games I’ve played where I think I preferred silence. Be prepared to listen to your own songs.

It’s also worth noting that sound effects won’t work out-of-box in DosBox. You’re going to need to do some work, basically adding a “ct-voice.drv” driver that’s specific to your emulated sound card. For reasons, DosBox won’t work with one for a Sound Blaster 16 or beyond. Be prepared to tweak your config file. But, DOS clearly isn’t the best way to play this anyway. It probably boots faster, and DOS seems to use the full screen – the Amiga version has that status bar and a big “HIRED GUNS” screen matte at the bottom that DOS will not. But the cost to sound and multiplayer control options isn’t worth it.

I didn’t like Hired Guns as a solo game. It works, in that you can beat it, but the fact that this is meant for multiple players is screamingly obvious. Having no AI whatsoever for the characters you aren’t controlling is a big part of what ruins solo play. Space Hulk has you controlling multiple characters, but their AI lets you set them up more like chess pieces. Between trying to awkwardly shuffle inventory around, navigate within the little windows, move them one-by-one to the exit for every level, and the fact that nobody really had a specialty – having four players felt like a worthless gimmick. Solo, the game really felt like a chore to beat.

But, this is meant to be a dungeon game you play with your friends. It’s smartly set up to do that and will challenge you accordingly. Limitations like the tiny screens, brief text descriptions, and hard-coded control options are the price you pay for playing together on one system. My hottest take is that this was so big on the Amiga because the Amiga didn’t have Doom – Doom can do the basic concept of fighting through levels with your friends in a way that is generationally better than what Hired Guns can offer. But, that requires four networked PCs and doesn’t have the RPG-lite nuances this does. Likely one of the best dungeon crawlers out there, but bring your friends and play on an Amiga.

 

The Good

A multiplayer twist on the dungeon crawler format. Adding height gives these levels more life and more caution than usual. Wide variety of sci-fi guns, enemy types, and “psi-amps” granting some magic-like powers.

 

The Bad

As an Amiga game, it’s probably 4 stars minimum. On DOS, you get awful sound and fewer control options. Crowding around a computer monitor isn’t quite as effortless as an N64. As a solo player, too much babysitting with too few purposeful differences between characters.