The game is somewhat unusual in that between levels, the player plays poker for extra health and ammunition. The character is armed with 4 default weapons; a knife, a pistol, a rifle and a shotgun. Other weapons that can be found are TNT and Whisky bombs. The player can shoot objects such as whisky bottles, cans and enemies to score legend points, thus filling up the "trick shot" meter that lets the character use the secondary mode of firing which varies depending on the current weapon. The combat in the game also makes use of the game's physics engine, with the player being able to trigger physics based traps such as shooting a rock and causing it to fall onto an enemy below - kills obtained this way are rewarded with extra points and a greater increase in the "trick shot" meter. Dead Man's Hand is noteworthy for featuring a protagonist of Hispanic (or Mestizo) descent.
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It feels pretty obviously designed for consoles of the time, which means it feels kinda slow and clunky even on PC. Default movement speed is really slow. No mid-level checkpoints. It's very short, which isn't really a bad thing in my eyes unless you bought it back then for 60 bucks. The shotguns are some of the worst i have seen, taking at times 4-5 shots to kill an enemy in medium range which makes them kinda useless. The boss fights are also that lazy kind where a regular enemy has tons of health and you have to shoot them 100 times, while regular enemies spawns constantly. They aren't hard (on medium), but they are not very fun.
The stuff it does right is the levels, which are fast-paced and varied. Every variety of cliche western location is represented and that is exactly what you want. And i know what you are thinking, yes, there is a train level. It's pretty short, but good. It does a decent job at that spaghetti western atmosphere, with it's cut-scenes presented like old timey black and white movies. Playing Poker at the start of each level to gain extra ammo is a pretty genius mechanic.
If you have played and finished GUN, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Outlaws, Red Dead Revolver multiple times and still want more wild west shooting it's not the worst thing.