Sunset Riders review: four bounty hunters and one fight over the reward

A wanted poster fills the screen. A face, a name, a reward. Then you ride into town with a gun and a friend at your side. Sunset Riders is a cooperative shooter with a small, sharp twist that turns friends into rivals right when it counts.

Why do friends end up fighting over the boss?

The game revolves around four bounty hunters, Steve, Billy, Bob and Cormano, clearing out outlaws across the American Old West. You work together through each stage, covering each other, sliding under attacks, throwing dynamite back before it explodes. Then the boss arrives, and a single rule changes the mood: the player who deals the most damage to the stage boss receives the entire bonus.

So the same people who spent the stage protecting each other spend the boss fight racing to land more shots. It never stops being cooperative, but it adds a little greed at exactly the right moment, and that greed is where the laughing starts.

A cooperative game is more fun when it lets friends be a little selfish.

A Western that knows it is a cartoon

The eight stages vary the pace nicely. Most are on foot, but two put you on horseback and one on a moving train. Power-ups come as sheriff's badges: gold for automatic fire, silver for a second gun, and both at once if you are lucky. Any hit costs a life, so the game is tense, but it is also generous with spectacle, and it never takes its cowboys seriously.

The arcade game came in a two-player version and a four-player version. In the four-player version every hunter has his own control panel, so four people in a row each become one character, and that is the whole spirit of the thing.

What it meant back then

Sunset Riders made its North American debut at the AMOA show in Las Vegas, and in the early nineties American arcade a four-player cabinet was a social event. You found it at the mall, at the roller rink, at the pizza place where a birthday party crowded around one machine. It was a Western, which felt natural to kids raised on cowboy movies on Saturday television, and it let a group of friends become a posse for as long as their quarters held out. Everybody had a favorite, and whoever got Cormano and his shotgun rarely gave him up.

Playing it today

It is still bright, loud and easy to love. One-hit deaths feel harsh, but the design is clear and the sense of humor holds up. Get three friends if you can. Then watch how quickly they forget about teamwork when the boss shows up.