A Fistful of Gun is a top-down Western shooter for up to nine people. You can crowd around one PC for local play, or join friends online for Arcade co-op; the official online servers cap connections at four client PCs, with players sharing computers to reach the nine-person total. The campaign is a separate, solo-focused route, while Arcade is where a posse takes on the same fight together. It is fast, loud, and deliberately odd: eleven gunslingers bring eleven different control schemes to a screen full of bullets, horses, whiskey, and bandits.
Arcade is the shared ride
Arcade mode strings together arena fights without a campaign endpoint. Your group arrives in a small, enclosed area, clears the enemies, and moves into another challenge. Between rounds, you choose a modifier that changes the next stretch: bullets might explode, movement might speed up, or shots may become more accurate. These are run-long advantages rather than permanent upgrades, so the same character can feel different as the arenas stack up. The mode keeps going until the posse runs out of lives or decides it has had enough of the gunfire.
Most arenas are about staying alive while removing the opposition. Enemies fire from different angles, and projectiles make even an open patch of ground feel crowded. Some encounters add a specific objective: escorting a cart, surviving a duel, protecting a dance, or dealing with a stampede. Other events lean into the game’s stranger Western humor, with peyote trips and explosive piñatas turning a shootout into a visual mess. The mix is not a mission-based co-op campaign; it is a string of short arcade rooms with occasional twists.
There is no class chart that assigns one friend to healing and another to support. The shared task is to clear a room, keep your lives, and push the run onward. Your individual character choices change how each person contributes moment to moment, and the game also tracks scores, so cooperation shares the arena without removing the urge to top a friend’s total. That makes Arcade a fit for a group that likes a clear, repeated objective and can enjoy a little score competition inside the same team run.
Eleven characters, eleven ways to shoot
The roster is the game’s defining complication. Each of the eleven gunslingers has a different weapon and control scheme, not just a new coat and damage value. Abel fires by flicking a gamepad stick toward a target and has to reload his whole six-shot cylinder. Noah uses a keyboard-controlled shotgun. Zeke’s long-range rifle is controlled with the mouse, while Duke’s machine gun fires as he spins but slows his movement. Other characters make shooting a timing or button-matching task. In a group, you are not all learning the same aim-and-fire layout at once.
That variety gives friends a reason to trade characters between runs, but it also affects setup. You need a gamepad, mouse, and keyboard in the group to use every character. Some gunslingers have a control method that is central to their design, so a controller-only friend or someone without a mouse may have a narrower choice. Arcade makes the full cast available up front; the Story route unlocks the roster as you progress. You can try a different input style without needing to build a character or carry equipment between sessions.
A single hit can cost a life, so the difference between a character that feels natural and one whose controls you are still parsing matters quickly. Horses offer speed and can absorb a hit, but they are not a durable mount. Whiskey can slow the action or increase damage, with a drunken visual effect that adds another layer to a screen already crowded with enemies and bullets. Gold picked up from fallen foes feeds upgrades and extra chances in the campaign; in Arcade, the between-room modifiers provide the more immediate run progression.
The characters do not divide neatly into traditional roles, and not every gimmick will suit every player. A charged blunderbuss, a direction-flick pistol, or a weapon that fires only when you press its displayed key can be funny to master, but the same quirks make precision harder when a room fills with hostile shots. The small pixel characters can blend into the earthy arenas, and a burst of effects may make it hard to see which bullets are headed toward you.
A story route for one gunslinger
The Story mode follows a posse of outlaws seeking revenge on railroad baron Clayton Boon after his plan to build a track to Hell. Its structure is a branching map of encounters rather than a long sequence of cinematic missions. Each cleared arena advances the journey by a mile, and you can choose between available routes that lead to different challenges. A stop might ask you to push a cart, sneak past searchlights, take on a duel, or deal with a wave of wildlife. Boss fights punctuate the route, while shops let you spend gold on weapon improvements or additional lives.
That campaign adds context and unlocks gunslingers, but it is not the mode to choose for a shared online story playthrough. Arcade is the mode for shared online play, with Versus available for competitive sessions. The Story route is built around one player at a time, so your group can take turns with its branching run, but it does not give everyone a shared campaign save. If your friends want to play together from the start, Arcade puts them into cooperative fights without that solo progression gate.
The campaign and Arcade both reuse the game’s arena combat, but their progression gives the action a different shape. Story mixes route choices, stores, and unlocks into a finite trip toward Boon. Arcade gets everyone to the full character roster immediately and turns rounds into a score chase with accumulating modifiers. Neither mode gives you a long-term character build to carry from one play night to another. The reward is mostly the next encounter, another weapon experiment, or a higher score before the run ends.
The online menu also includes Versus, where players can fight each other rather than share a team objective. Local multiplayer supports Versus too, so the same PC setup can switch from an enemy-filled Arcade run to a direct contest. That distinction matters for groups: the game offers both cooperation and competition, but the mode name tells you which kind of session you are starting. The co-op recommendation here is specifically about Arcade, not a claim that every multiplayer option puts the whole group on one side.
How to get the posse in one match
Local play supports up to nine people on a single PC. The whole group shares one view rather than getting separate split-screen panels, so you are all watching the same compact arena. Four or five players make a more comfortable group size, while difficulty rises sharply at nine. Even a smaller group has to share the visual space, and the action gets harder to follow as every person and projectile competes for attention.
Official online sessions connect four client PCs, with up to nine people when players share those computers. That means nine people, not nine PCs. Steam Remote Play Together can stream the host’s local game to friends, but the shared local session still runs on one host PC.
Online play uses rooms on a selected server: one player creates a room and friends on that server can see and join it. The game also includes a server program for people who want to host their own. Public sessions may be empty, so invite your friends rather than assuming another posse will be waiting.
A Fistful of Gun is a Windows game. Everyone who joins separately online needs a Windows PC. Using the full character roster requires a gamepad, a mouse, and a keyboard. Remote Play Together gives the host a way to stream local play, but it does not turn one local session into a separate online campaign. This makes the group setup clearest when everyone has compatible Windows access and the players using less familiar characters have the right input device.
A rowdy arcade Western
The visual style pairs chunky pixel art with a top-down view that keeps the whole combat room in frame. Dusty colors, tiny character sprites, oversized bullets, and abrupt screen effects make the arenas look like a hectic arcade cabinet rather than a grounded gunfight. The soundtrack swings between spaghetti-Western twang and louder rock, while the story’s revenge premise gives the shooting a deliberately exaggerated pulp tone. The result is more cheeky and chaotic than suspenseful.
That chaos can be a selling point when your group wants a short, noisy arcade run, but it is also the game’s sharpest limit. Enemies can kill in one hit, projectiles cross the arena from multiple directions, and some character controls ask for precise timing on top of that. The game leaves a lot for you to infer from icons and effects, so there is a learning curve even before you add a whole group to the screen.
If your friends like experimental controls, shared-screen chaos, and a run that ends when the group runs out of lives, Arcade offers a distinct co-op setup. It is less suitable if you want a conventional twin-stick shooter or a cooperative story campaign. The best fit is a posse that already knows who is joining and is happy to trade clean precision for a stranger, louder kind of arcade Western.