SCALPERS: Turtle & the Moonshine Gang

I've looked at a lot of co-op shooters that pitch themselves as the next Castle Crashers, and most of them share the same problem: they're built for four people and then quietly stuffed onto a storefront with a singleplayer tag. Scalpers: Turtle & the Moonshine Gang is exactly that kind of game. It's a top-down twin-stick shooter where you pick from four playable bounty hunter characters, each with their own loadout options, and work through objective-based levels while enemy waves swarm the screen and bosses soak up an uncomfortable amount of bullets. The visual identity - anthropomorphic animals in a Wild West setting - is genuinely charming, and at its best the game can produce the kind of panicked, everyone-shouting co-op chaos that the genre promises. The combat loop gives you a spread of weapons and special abilities to mix and match across your four characters, and there is a progression system built around unlocking upgrades by completing in-game tasks or grinding in-game currency toward loot boxes. That structure has some appeal on paper. In practice, the grind is steep enough that unless your group is genuinely skilled, you're going to feel locked out of meaningful progression for longer than feels fair. Enemy attack telegraphs - lines and circles on the ground that show you where hits are coming - are a smart touch and do give you something to read in the middle of a firefight. The bosses, though, lean hard into the bullet-sponge school of design, and some of the level sections drag to the point where they stop feeling challenging and start feeling like busywork. The modes list is surprisingly broad for an indie at this price tier: up to four players in online or local co-op, up to eight players in PvP, four named difficulty levels plus an Expert+ mode with infinite scaling, and global leaderboards. If you have a consistent group of three or four who actually communicate, there are real sessions to be had here. The difficulty curve rewards coordination, and the leaderboard angle gives competitive players something to chase. The close-range weapons like the machete create awkward difficulty spikes in certain sections, which points to balance work that never fully got finished - weapon choice matters here, not always in a fun way. The bigger red flag is the solo experience. Enemy spawns were clearly tuned around a full group. Objective-based sections that require you to hold a position while absorbing swarms are genuinely punishing when you are one person, not four. The Steam community flagged this repeatedly and the evidence suggests it was never meaningfully addressed. Launch stability complaints also surface in community discussions, including crash-on-start reports. For a game released in 2018 with a very small user base, ongoing support is not something you should count on. Bottom line: this one lives or dies by your lobby. If you have three friends with controllers ready and you want something looser and stranger than your standard Horde mode offering, it can deliver a session or two of genuine fun. Go in solo or with one random and you will probably uninstall it the same afternoon. The bones are decent, the execution is uneven, and the player population is thin enough that finding online strangers to fill your squad is optimistic at best. Fred, Scout Team