In Dead Man's Hand you play El Tejón, betrayed by your former gang members and left for dead after trying to 'discuss some issues'. In true spaghetti Western fashion El Tejón manages to survive and decides to use his new lease on life to wreak bloody vengeance on 'the Nine'. To this end you are lead on a bounty chase across the Old West hunting down former friends, eventually going after their leader, Tennessee Vic.

Taking the bounties is as easy as selecting missions from the map screen. For the most part choices follow a fairly linear path: take the first mission available (which will show the second half of the mission, in which you will come face to face with the bounty) and go from there. Occasionally bonus missions for different bounties will pop up which are only one level long and can take place in some unique settings with some?well, let's say interesting characters. Gameplanet encourages all players to attempt the second bonus bounty that shows up to get a glimpse of some of the more interesting aspects of the Old West.

With the next mission selected, there's one more thing to take part in before beginning, and that's a game of Poker. This allows the player to gamble for bonuses that will be given at the start of the mission. These bonuses can include a partially filled 'power' bar (when it's full enough you can use an alternative fire method on the guns), or extra ammo for your rifle, pistol or shotgun. Of course, the more you gamble the more you can win, but it's just as easy to lose it all. While this might seem to be a gimmick when you first start playing, later on it can be a real lifesaver having some of the bonuses from the start.

Dead Man's Hand really does follow an arcade style as you might expect from the nature of its inspiration. In each level you have the opportunity to take out more than just the bad guys to score points; in fact, sometimes altering the landscape via a barrel of TNT or a mine cart will net you more points if you happen to kill the bad guy with the resultant falling debris than if you had just put a pistol round through him. The fact that you score lower points on easier difficulty levels also adds to the 'must beat high score?mentality that develops on some missions.

As mentioned earlier, whenever El Tejón finally manages to track down one of the Nine, a boss battle ensues. These boss fights add to the arcade feel of the game, and are replete with a health bar at the top of the screen for the boss, which lets you know when to swap to your trusty knife and get a stylish knife slash in to finish him.

The drawback to the arcade feel of DMH is that it game doesn't allow for much deviation from the path you are required to take, something unusual for 3D PC shooters. For instance, on several different missions an easy way to get behind a couple of bad guys and take them out can be found, only these routes are more often than not blocked by an invisible wall. Also adding to this feeling of "you must go this way?is the fact that on some levels enemies will continue to spawn until you have reached a certain point in the level.

This is a shame because the Unreal engine being used in the game just feels like it is being underutilised, and the fun that could have come from riding on horseback chasing down bad-guys doesn't really come across as it could have.

Continuing with the graphics, it really should be noted that at the start of the game it seems that brown, and varying shades of brown, are going to be the overall colour scheme for the game. This does make sense given the setting of the game, but makes for a rather dull look after the third time through a brown town. Fortunately this doesn't stay the same the whole way through the game, with some missions taking you into mountain forests and others on to clifftops.

As might be expected, in DMH the AI is rather lacklustre. Often bad guys will give away their positions with shots that were fired way to early, or even worse (as you can seen in a screenshot) forget how to throw things like the dynamite or whiskey bombs. However, while the AI might have a hard time with some of the weapons in the game, the player will have some fun. In all there are nine guns to choose from, 3 pistols, 3 rifles (two of which have a scope, but the special bar must be charged enough to fire when using the scope) and 3 shotguns.

In the beginning you can only choose from one in each category (you have a pistol, rifle and shotgun on you at all times) but as you progress through the game you will unlock new weapons. All the guns are historically accurate, and the shotguns especially have a nice feeling to them when barging into a doorway and getting kicked back a little by the shot you fired from them. Whiskey bombs and dynamite can be picked up during missions and can be effective at clearing out small gatherings of bad-guys, but can be a bit fiddly to use in a tight situation.

Audio in the game is on the whole decent - all the guns have a decent sound to them, explosions make a decent enough noise, but bad guys seem to sometimes make noises that are far too loud for the distance they are from you. Often you can find yourself hearing an extremely loud "boy I'm gonna git you?from someone who is almost at the limit of rifle range, other times from someone just beyond the door. The voice acting is suitably cheesy, to go along with the clich?story, Gameplanet is just not sure if this was by design or not.

One thing that Gameplanet feels must be mentioned here is the lack of a jewel case for the CDs (something Atari has been doing with a number of recent releases), which is a little annoying, especially when they ship a manual that is done in the theme of an old west quarterly newspaper. While it isn't exactly normal to criticize the packaging of the CDs, and on PC the game's RRP is very competitive, seeing some lacklustre paper sleeves just felt like a bit of a letdown after seeing the effort put into the manual.