10 Video Game Abilities Developers Always Get Wrong
9. Dual-Wielding Guns
Rockstar
What's better than having one gun? Having two guns, of course!
Dual wielding handguns is a tried and tested staple of the action genre, and is particularly synonymous with the Wild West. It's also been a regular feature in video games for quite some time. Only, most of the time, even when wielding two pistols feels good, it doesn't always feel great.
Most games that feature a dual wielding mechanic will take one of two approaches. One: the player will aim with the left trigger to lock onto one target, and fire with the right trigger to alternate shots between both weapons, or two; they'll aim with the right analogue stick and shoot from either weapon by pulling either the left or right trigger. Both approaches are fine in their own way, but both present the same problem - you can only aim at one target at a time.
Now I don't know about you, but surely one of the big draws of actually firing two weapons at once is the idea that you can target more than one thing at a time? You see it all the time on the big screen, but it seems almost impossible to translate into gameplay.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
