[Mr. Tibbs]

The other day I was flipping through an old gaming mag and came across an article about an Unreal engine powered sequel to one my favourite Amiga games, Hired Guns. Since I had never heard about it, I assumed it had been cancelled like countless other overly ambitious late 90's shooters (Amen: The Awakening, X-Com: Alliance and, I guess, DNF) and was long done and dusted. The game was essentially content complete when Psygnosis pulled out of pc development altogether, and left the team struggling to find a publisher for a niche title. But after a quick search online, I noticed that about six years ago an ex-employee leaked a nearly complete version of the game online. The beta includes all the levels, weapons and enemies but obviously isn't finished. I can't for the life of me get it to work. I would love to check out this long forgotten game and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

You can download the beta here: http://fromwithin.co...dGunsSequel.iso

Article scans here: Scan 1 Scan 2 and Scan 3


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The team was included the late Adam Adamowicz (Bethesda's concept artist) and many DMA design vets.

[gibfrag]

Wow this is bad ass. I hope I can get it to work!

What isn't finished in the game?

[Mr. Tibbs]

I think the missions don't lead into one another, though they're apparently selectable through the menu. A few scripting errors and few other outstanding bugs. According to the artist that leaked it, it was nearly done, and although the build says it's an internal demo it's the full game.

Let me know if it works for you. It installs fine but I can't get it to start. I might try a glidewrapper later tonight or rollback my drivers to see if I can get into the game. It looks pretty badass. There's nothing worse than to see years of work stuck in limbo because it's too risky for a retail release.

[X-Vector]

I had completely forgotten about this one; in fact I thought this thread was about Hired Team, an awful Russian Quake 3 clone that I played a demo of back in 2000 or so.
Hired Guns looks a lot better and does remind me of X-Com Alliance (-> squad member feeds), of which there is now beta footage available on Youtube.

BTW, Mobygames also lists Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge, which is a completely different game, also made in Russia.

[Mr. Tibbs]

I came across it yesterday while looking for that X-COM Alliance beta, X-Vector. There's two of them, 219 and 220 but the links are no longer active. I would love to track them down. It sucked when that was cancelled.

I had never heard of the Unreal version of Hired Guns, but I had played the original on my extremely outdated Amiga back in day. It's such a neat idea. A two-person Canadian dev team kind of recreated the concept this year in title called Signal Ops, and while it's charming and creative, the core conceit of having to carry around a radio to see your squad kind of ruins the game. It has too much micro-management. It's like a fiddly singleplayer game with the stress of multplayer. I wonder if the Unreal version of Hired Guns is any different. I love the look of the art style.

The other day I saw this crazy Russian They Live meets Condemned rip-off called They're Alive. What a crazy thing. Copyright laws be damned!