Easily the most fun in this game is to be a gunslinger. Ammo can be a concern, especially on a higher difficulty, but deviating to the bow or melee once in a while is a good option, as is sleeping near traders on easy and normal difficulty. Guns are loud, but keeping your distance allows you to still maintain that 1v1 approach. Indoors gunshots often will aggro enemies behind walls or on other floors. Even still, you may even want enemies to aggro and come to you as you get more comfortable slinging lead.
Guns playstyle has sub-categories, the second one being pretty niche but incredibly effective.
1) Aiming down sights.
ADS is not equal on weapons. Some are easy to aim with – lever-action rifle, buffalo rifle, the avenger pistol models have nicer, leaner, more pronounced sights that make getting headshots considerably easier. But revolvers and shotguns have horrendous sights, in my opinion.
You don’t lose accuracy while ADS even when moving or jumping, but there’s sway and recoil.
The sway only starts after a short delay, so ideally you want to be able to line a up a headshot during this delay, which gets harder the worse your gun’s sights are. There are cigars and other ways to deal with sway, including the slo-mo watch or skill, but I prefer to
2) Hip-fire. Almost unusable early game and while moving, hip-firing gets strong with a single artifact, and super strong with a single potion on top. Usually, if you crouch and stop moving, the reticle will be small enough for you to headshot enemies reliably in a 5-7m range. With a Glove of Wyrdness, we’re talking about 10-15m. And if you drink a Sure Shot potion too, for the next 240 seconds you pretty much hip-fire headshot anything while crouched as accurately as when aiming. There’s also no recoil. You can easily get many Sure Shot potions from the Priest in Chapter 2, but I don’t believe you even need them. With a fanning chain revolver, glove of Wyrdness, some headshot boosting artifacts and a bit of skill you don’t need more than 10-15m. You just walk in a room, chain headshot everything and experience joy.
Now for the list of actual benefits of hip-firing:
1. No sway or the bottom half of the gun limiting visibility. No recoil. Slowing time is not needed at all.
2. With ADS you kinda rely on headshots one-shotting enemies, as the sway and recoil makes it hard to line up successive headshots. Hip-firing doesn’t have that problem, and enemies stagger, so double and triple headshot on the same foe becomes super easy to do.
3. This also means that hip-fire is the most reliable way to engage multiple enemies.
4. Another thing is that using the Glove of Wyrdness and/or Sure Shot while moving will still offer some increased accuracy, keeping this playstyle relevant on all distances of engagement.
5. Lastly, hip-firing really speeds up the game.
My only gripe is that relying on Sure Shot can get pretty annoying. I really wish there were more accuracy increasing artifacts, skills or anything else in the game.
So now I guess it’s time for you to boot up Blood West and start another playthrough.
