Sombrero: Spaghetti Western Mayhem (PC) Review

Sombrero: Spaghetti Western Mayhem is really an exercise in what makes couch play so exciting. You and three friends get together, and jump into one of the four modes, and into one of four arenas. Each mode offers a distinct challenge, and each arena is well designed to present escalating difficulty. There is a standard Capture the Flag mode, which, as you might expect, requires grabbing the opponents flag and returning to your base without dying. The Deathmatch mode is a free for all, as players try to eliminate each other enough times to be the supreme killing machine, while Loot has the players scrambling to collect more cash than each other.

The most distinct mode is Banditos, which is just a game of keep-away with a statue. In reality, all of these modes are essentially the same thing one might expect from any co-op title. While it may sound trite, it's actually nice to see a game call back to the modes that made the genre so popular, even if there's nothing particularly innovative about them. Now, while it's clearly fun to dive in, there are some glaring issues that dampen the fun.

In Banditos, for instance, when the player holding the idol is killed, the idol will respawn, and it seems to have a bad habit of spawning directly in front of the other players, and, even in a two-player match, it can seemingly follow one player around. One particular arena is so small, it feels occasionally unfair in Deathmatch when players can just be mowed down because they spawned in an awkward location. These little flaws accumulate into annoyances that drag the experience down when taken as a whole.

It might seem like the limited modes and arenas would make the experience old quick, but it's really not something that could be turned into a 10-hour experience. Perhaps, if the developer had built more into this title, it could really shine through its flaws. This is fun for all its shortcomings, but there's not enough to make this more than a fun party game that wears out its welcome about an hour in. Therefore, playing it in short bursts is definitely advised, because, as of right now, it really only takes about an hour to see everything this has to offer.

There is an online mode, but there doesn't appear to be any major differences in it. You could stretch the content out playing against other players (theoretically), but it's still the same few stages with the same few modes. While there is nothing explicitly making this experience bad, the small issues that are here just add insult to injury when it becomes clear there just isn't very much content here right now.