Bandits Bane

Roughly one figure in four that pops out of a doorway in this game is an unarmed civilian. That is not an impression — it is in the code. Every time the game picks what to show you next it draws from a table of 25 slots: the six bandit types take three slots each, the six hostages one each, and one slot spawns nobody. Eighteen bandits, six civilians, one empty. You get five seconds to tell them apart.

That number turns Bandits Bane from a reaction test into a decision test. Shooting fast is easy. Shooting fast at only the right target, from a six-round revolver you reload by hand, while masked men in the same frame shoot back, is a different exercise. A bandit is worth between 10 and 150 points. A hostage costs you 100.

The frame around it is a small, strict campaign. Five levels in one Wild West town — the main street, the ground outside the sheriff's office, the inside of the saloon, the edge of town, and finally the back room of the bank with the safes hanging open. The kill counter never resets, so the quotas are cumulative: 10, 20, 30, 50 and 75 bandits to finish the game.

It was built by Code This Lab, a studio near Naples, Italy, making browser games since 2009, and released on 21 March 2016 under its real name, The Bandit Hunter — still the name on the browser tab, in the app manifest and on the wooden sign of the title screen. The last update, in December 2016, added a fullscreen button. On Y8, where it has been up since January 2018, it sits at 7.6 out of 10 from 197 votes.

Shoot, don't shoot: a mechanic with a paper trail back to 1895

What Bandits Bane is actually doing has a name in law enforcement — a shoot / don't shoot drill — and a lineage you can follow back to a newspaper cartoon.

It starts with Hogan's Alley, a comic strip by Richard F. Outcault about a fictional New York slum, drawn in the 1890s; it is the strip that produced the Yellow Kid. Around 1919 a shooting range at Camp Perry, Ohio, borrowed the name, and from 1926 a police academy on the same site used it. From there "Hogan's Alley" became the generic term for any tactical range with pop-up targets you are supposed to judge before firing. The FBI moved its own to the academy at Quantico, Virginia, in 1954.

Then it became a video game. In 1984 Nintendo released Hogan's Alley for the Famicom, with arcade and NES versions the following year, built around the Zapper light gun. Cardboard cutouts flip towards the player carrying a mixture of gangsters and innocent bystanders, three at a time on the wall stages and five on the city-block stages, and shooting an innocent costs you a life. That is the entire template: identify, then fire.

The real facility caught up in 1987. After the 1986 Miami shootout, in which two FBI agents were killed and five wounded while trying to arrest a pair of bank robbers, the Bureau built a ten-acre fake town at Quantico — a bank, a motel, a jewellery shop, a pool hall, a cinema, suburban houses — on the reasoning that federal agents face more shoot / don't shoot situations than local police, and that you cannot rehearse those on a flat range.

Bandits Bane is the browser descendant of that idea, with a mouse instead of a Zapper and a fine instead of a life: a fixed viewpoint, targets that appear and withdraw on a timer, and a penalty severe enough that hesitating is genuinely the better play. Where it differs is honest about being a game — 24 per cent civilians is a far higher rate than any real range would use, because a drill wants you to be right and a game wants you to be nervous.

The town bank almost never actually got robbed

The premise is the oldest one in the western: the bank is being held up, the townsfolk are hostages, somebody with a revolver has to sort it out. It is also, as history, close to fiction.

Larry Schweikart and Lynne Pierson Doti went looking for frontier bank robberies for their book Banking in the American West from the Gold Rush to Deregulation, and found almost none. Across the fifteen states of the frontier west, over the forty years from 1859 to 1900, the count of confirmed robberies runs from three or four definite cases up to about eight, depending on how strictly you define one. Schweikart's own summary is that there are more bank robberies in present-day Dayton, Ohio, in a single year than in the entire Old West in a decade.

The reasons are dull and practical, which is why the movies skipped them. Frontier banks sat in the middle of town, frequently within sight of the sheriff's office. Their walls were doubly reinforced, and blowing a hole in one woke every person for two streets. A town of a few hundred people, most of them armed, is a bad place to spend twenty minutes on a safe.

Which makes the game's own geography quietly funny. Level two is fought directly in front of the sheriff's office — the building that, historically, is the reason level five's vault should never have been opened at all. The gangs that did rob banks, the ones everybody can name, are famous precisely because they were rare.

Bandits Bane, The Bandit Hunter, and playing it unblocked

If you search for this game you will find it under two names, and both are correct. The Bandit Hunter is what Code This Lab called it when they released it in March 2016; it is the name on the title screen, in the browser tab and in the app manifest inside the build. Bandits Bane is the name under which the game is distributed today. Nothing else changed — same five levels, same 25-slot spawn table, same 75 bandits.

It also settles an argument. Portals disagree wildly about how old the game is — one dates it to 2018, another to 2022 — because those are the dates each site added it. The build itself is unambiguous: the offline manifest inside the game is stamped 20 December 2016, one day before the developer's last published update.

The other thing worth knowing is how light it is. This is a Construct 2 export at 810×540 that scales to whatever screen it lands on: one HTML page, a handful of sprite sheets, no plugin, no installer, no login. That is exactly the profile that survives a school network, which is why a game from 2016 keeps turning up in "unblocked" searches a decade later. Press play above and it runs inside this page — keyboard and mouse on a laptop, tap and on-screen reload button on a tablet. Turn a phone to landscape first; the game will ask you to.

More games like this

If it is the aim-and-click part you came for, Stickman Gun Shooter 3D puts the same instinct in a third-person setting, and Warfare Area trades the revolver for something with a much larger magazine.

If it is the judgement — the deciding, not the shooting — then Hunter Assassin is the closer relative: one hit kills, and the whole game is choosing your moment. And for the same reflexes with nothing to identify, Relic Runway and Skate Hooligans are pure reaction. The rest is in the adventure category.

1. Move the mouse, watch the whole street. Targets appear across the width of the scene, high and low — a doorway, a rooftop, behind a barrel — from one of sixteen positions drawn at random.
2. Identify before you click. Bandits wear bandanas over their faces and hold a gun. Hostages are townsfolk with empty hands, three men and three women. There is no other tell, and no bonus for being early.
3. Fire with a left click, or a tap. Every bandit has exactly one hit point, so a hit is always a kill.
4. Reload with R — or the on-screen button on a phone. Six rounds, then the gun just clicks.
5. Clear the quota. The header counts down the bandits still owed before the next level.

Six things the game does not tell you:

• A miss costs a bullet. The revolver empties on clicks, not on hits. Spraying at a figure you are unsure about is the most expensive habit in the game.
• Reload into an empty street. Targets arrive every two seconds on level one and every 1.5 seconds from level two, and each stays about five. Reloading with three men on screen is how runs end.
• Standing still is fatal. Left alone, the bandits shoot. In a test run with no return fire, a full health bar was gone before level one was half over.
• The big earners hit hardest. The 150-point bandit takes 10 of your 100 health per shot; the 10-point one takes 3. The targets worth the most are also the ones you cannot afford to leave standing.
• Your score cannot go below zero. The hostage penalty is only applied if you already have 100 points banked, so early mistakes are cheaper than late ones.
• The back half is the long half. Levels one to three ask for ten kills each. Level four asks for twenty and level five for twenty-five.