Where are all the cowboy games? Bald marines seeking crouch-level cover emerge from the shadowy, inexplicably-brown wastes of the industry’s finest on a weekly basis, whilst the sheer brutality and unique charisma of the western era has gone largely ignored. Thankfully, Rockstar have kicked down that paticular door recently with the fantastic Red Dead Redemption, so hopefully many more devs will step up and give us more adventures in this interesting setting!

Hopefully, they’ll be better than this game. Nope, I’m not reviewing Red Dead Redemption. Partly because I know what my final rating would be, and partly because it would torpedo my scholastic career for all eternity. No, this is a multiplayer-only indie outlaw-em-up, developed by newcomers FatShark. Well, okay, not “newcomers” exactly, but “GRIN 2: License Harder” isn’t as polite. They seem to be following the path of their precursors: One good 2D Bionic Commando game, followed by a bunch of crap and a swift bankruptcy. And unfortunately for them, there are no grappling hook arms in this game.

The premise is pretty familiar – two teams, with members selecting from a choice of brightly dressed unique-looking gunslingers with different talents and weapons, compete in various attack/defend game modes in a collection of desert-based landscapes. That sound you heard was either Valve rolling their eyes really hard, or the splashback from them diving into their Scrooge McDuck-style money pool. They can’t be feeling too threatened by this, though, since I played this through a free weekend on Steam. Which is good, cause it saved me money.

The primary problem with the game, surprisingly, is not in it’s derivative gameplay but in the netcode. I’m not sure what kind of bizarre, half-broken code GRI–… FatShark, sorry, uses to create a situation where a server hosted by a random bittorrenting idiot on a 56k connection gives me a better ping than every dedicated server running, but I’m pretty sure some kind of Invisible War-level fiasco was going on behind the scenes there. The fact that Dedicated Servers – a kind of vital part of any PC shooter worth it’s shaders – were haphazardly patched in well after launch further implies that something’s kind of gone horrifically wrong somewhere down the line. And the game’s initials being LaG… well, that’s just rubbing salt in the wound, really.

A multiplayer game that actively fights my attempts to play it with other people is something I can’t actively recommend. I give it one out of the four cowboy games that exist.