Game:

Cactus McCoy 2: The Ruins of Calavera (2011)

Category:

Walkthrough

Duration: 8:03

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34

Cactus McCoy brings you out to the wild west where cactus roam free shooting, slashing, and bashing their foes into submission.

Wait, what?

That's right, Cactus McCoy puts you into the cactusy shoes of the hero, Cactus McCoy in his rush against time. But let's back track a bit first. The game starts with your character being offered a whole load of cash to retrieve an ancient treasure. For the savvy reader, this should be an immediate tip-off that bad things are about to go down, and as the introduction tells you, quite bad things do indeed go quite down. Your character is cursed and turned into a cactus man, and unless the artifact is returned to it rightful resting place, you'll go from cactus to stone like the previous owner. To that end, you go from level to level trying to get to the end in time.

The great thing is that each of the levels is wonderfully designed. The levels gradual progress in difficulty, with everything perfectly balanced to provide the perfect challenge. Enemies (or enemigos as the game calls them rather) start off as no-challenge jokes, but eventually progress to nuisances, to obstacles, and finally to worthy opponents as the game goes on.

And if great gameplay wasn't enough (it should be, that's what you're playing for, isn't it?) the game is wonderfully presented, with everything drawn and animated well. The levels are all extremely detailed, with everything adding to the overall atmosphere and enhancing the game even further. But enough of that, let's talk about the actual game, shall we?

Rattler Ravine brings you back out to the desert, but this time around you've got tougher enemies to deal with. They're also armed with a few different weapons, such as snakes used as whips, katanas (what are they doing in the wild west?), and morningstars, to name a few. On the plus side, you too have new weapons at your disposal, one of which is a personal favorite: the bucket of scorpions. You chuck them anywhere, and they'll crawl across the ground, up walls, and around corners to take down your foes for you.

Speaking of scorpions, they feature in the first challenge. Littered throughout the level are various scorpion targets. They tend to be in out-of-the-way areas, hidden from view with only a small opening visible to you. Fortunately, scorpions can, as stated above, crawl up walls and will happily wander through said small openings to destroy the targets.

For this level's time challenge, you're given two minutes and twenty seconds. This is a very wide level, with a great deal of exploration available both on the horizontal and the vertical. Like other challenges, it's best to beat the level at least once before trying this.

As a bit of note, no animals were harmed in the making of this game. That said, various enemigos were. You have to use rattlesnakes as whips to kill 25 enemigos to get the third challenge. Rattlesnakes are relatively plentiful on the level (as are enemigos, but that goes without saying) so this should be a pretty easy task.

Like the scorpion challenge, there are a bunch of gun targets around the level. You can't use just any gun though, you have to use a derringer. Those, unlike rattlesnakes, can be a bit tough to find, so be wise in your use of ammunition.

The final challenge is the toughest of the five. It's easy to juggle an enemy around by hitting them after they go down and thus keeping them in the air. What's hard about this though, is that you have to do it with three different weapons. The key is to find a nice area with a single enemigo. Make sure there are various weapons littered about, and then rapidly hit the dying enemigo, drop your weapon, get another, and hit him again. Rinse and repeat.

And that about does it for Rattler Ravine, now on to the Brimstone Mine!

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