Gun

"An ambitious effort that overextends itself"

The Western genre has for too long been a niche category for gamers. Even in Hollywood, we've seen a sharp decline in the existential wasteland of the 19th century. That era of blazing six shooters, hookers with hearts of gold, senseless brutality and even a dash of romance just seems so well suited for a great story and a better game. Sadly, Neversoft's GUN isn't one of them. More known for their Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, Neversoft had promised us a wide open, free roaming adventure set in the west and instead giving us a short, linear, and unworthy title.

The Good:

Visually, GUN is a gorgeous looking game with a suitably diverse array of environments. From the gold tinted leaves of autumn to the glowing sunset over the mountain peaks, this game just oozes oil painting in nearly every frame. The camera control works well here, as you can rotate and tilt the camera at will, even when galloping atop your trusty steed. The horses (which you can obtain from certain areas) all control tightly, and look incredibly well animated. Combat while riding your horse is relatively easy, with a helpful assist aiming system that will lock on to enemies when you successfully target them.

The story creates a suitable progress for the action. You, as Colton, must track down the clues necessary to find a mysterious treasure. The greed of many for this treasure has caused the deaths of those close to you, so expect a traditional tale of revenge and redemption. Along the way there will be betrayals, revelations, and plot twists a plenty. A talented roster of Hollywood actors including Lance Henrikson (Millennium), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), Kris Kristofferson (Blade), and Brad Douriff (Child's Play) bring their respective characters to life far better than most Hollywood enlisted voice actors. It's obvious this group of voice actors took the work seriously, and it shows in the final product.

Another aspect in which this game succeeds is the variety of difficulty options. They have an Easy mode for gaming beginners, Normal for the casual gamers, and Hard (which I did my first play through on) or Insane for those looking for a challenge. All are selectable from the beginning, and a nice little option more games should have.

You can wander about the environments as you please, taking up small jobs to earn cash, or doing a bit of bounty hunting. Poker tournaments are available, so bone up on your Texas Hold 'Em skills. These side missions sound pretty good on paper, but like the rest of GUN, fail to execute or entertain for long.

The Bad:

While the side missions sound great, the actual playing of them falls rather flat. Side missions are limited in number, so once you finish them and the game, that is it. They don't respawn or restart. The poker game has little to no animation, and no interaction with the other characters. In fact, it's like playing a poker game on a Tiger hand held game. You see the cards and choose from a simple menu. No trash talk between players, no music in the background. This is a recurring problem found in the game, the lack of personality. Take for example the two cities you explore and walk around. There's no built in day/night change, so everything is conceivably open during the day. Walking into a saloon at high noon, you'd expect to see card players, cowboys chugging beer and whiskey, generally causing quite the ruckus. Instead, you'll find maybe a card dealer and one other person. Most of the time there won't even be a bartender. What makes this worse is how large the saloon is; this just accentuates how empty and soulless the buildings feel. The buildings have almost as little personality as the people you'll find on the street. Apparently these citizens have nothing to say to one another, ever.

Riding the horse will take up a lot of your time, and so they worked quite hard on it. However, there are some issues with the horse riding as well. For one, there's no real relationship formed with your horse as they are replaced every few minutes. In between cut scenes your horse will inexplicably change colors. Another flaw with the horse riding are walls; you can run into walls with the horse, and even gallop in place. Finally, the biggest flaw of all is the speed of the horse. Apparently in the wild west of GUN, there are exactly three speeds of horse, and acceleration is instantaneous. You have a walk, a trot, and a full on gallop. The speed doesn't sound like a big deal, until you try to match pace with another rider doing a cattle drive or the like. You'll find yourself constantly passing them and waiting for them, or galloping then trotting, galloping then trotting. Give us more speed variations if horseback riding is going to be a big part of the game!

Another problem with the side quests you take on is how the game takes you out of the experience. You're asked whether you want to take the mission, and after you select Yes, it begins. It tells you exactly where to go, and when it's done, another screen pops up telling you your reward. For such an immersing game, this is jolting and often an annoyance. Take for example a bounty-hunting mission. You've caught the guy, subdued him, and killed all his friends. Once that's done, the reward screen pops up, and when it returns you to the game, everything has disappeared. All the ammo on the ground, the guy you captured, and whatever else wasn't there in the game world to begin with. Just hope your horse is still alive, or you'll have a loooong walk back. This is really a small complaint, but one of many that add up to plague the game.

And The UGLY:

Like it's been said, this game looks great. But when you start to really get to the meat of the game, you'll find it riddled with flaws that ultimately undermine the experience.

Let's start by going back to the bounty hunting, because this issue of mine is found throughout the game. When you accept a bounty off the poster (with a blank picture), you're thrown into the mission right away. Now, for someone who's watched a lifetime of westerns, we all know the best way to get a bounty is to sneak up on the guy. If there's one thing Clint Eastwood was good at doing, it was getting right up on a guy and taking him out after delivering a cool one liner. Well, don't expect that in this game. Enemies will know exactly where you are the moment you break their invisible barrier/sixth sense, which is remarkably broad. So running around a house to get on their backside means nothing because they know at all times where you are. The moment you pop your head out to look (don't even bother using the side lean on a higher difficulty), a rifleman is firing at you because he magically knows which side of that big rock you're leaning out of. Hell, even the Indians will be able to hit you while side strafing with arrows. It's a wonder they somehow lost battles with those kinds of skills.

What makes this even more unbalanced is the turret weapons. You try to sneak up on a Gatling gun, but it's just impossible (I'm an Extreme MGS'er, a Silent Assassin Hitman, and a 4 star player on Manhunt, so I know a bit about stealth games) because of this. But of course, when you have an AI rifleman or grab that turret, this doesn't matter at all because the CPU is a crack shot. Even with a pistol while mounted on a horse riding the opposite direction.

The side effect of this is that basically, GUN becomes a sniping game. A good 85% of your encounters will be done from a long distance where the AI is unable to see you and so doesn't fire at all. The glorious ideal of blazing six shooters will have to take a backseat, especially on higher levels. That's another regard in which this supposedly immersive game fails; the feeling that you're a badass gunslinger. Sure you can kill a lot of guys, but it simply doesn't feel satisfying when you can't see the whites in their eyes. The gore and physics look great, but it loses a bit when you only get to enjoy it through your rifle's sights.

Another aspect that can feel grating is the boss AI. Now, it's understandable that bosses should be a bit stronger and tougher, but playing this game on just Hard can be quite frustrating. Let's look over one early boss fight in particular (don't worry, I'll keep it spoiler free). This is so early in the game that you're given pointers during the fight (of course this is the best time to get pointers, not worry about the boss shooting at you, right?), in which you're stuck in a small barn with the boss. He has a double-barreled shotgun to your single, and so he can kill you with one load. But hey, we've all faced tougher odds than that right? So I try to lean out and shoot him, and I score two or so solid shotgun blasts to his face, which does almost no damage. Fine, fine, this is just harder than most, I figure. So I start to move around like their pointers tell me, rolling side to side. But get this: as soon as I get a good lead, the boss decides his super powered shotgun isn't enough. He runs up to me and one hit kills me with his knife, a technique the player literally has no answer for. Who in their right mind would charge a guy blasting you with a shotgun at point blank range, in the face, to take the fight in close? Why, a guy who knows he's a boss enemy and can kill you with one shot! I like challenge, but this is adding challenge in the laziest possible way.

Sadly, the value in this game is the weakest part. Over the course of the game, you'll find many highs and lows, but after the main storyline is beaten, there is very little to come back for. If you rushed through the game without doing side missions, you'll probably have spent about four hours on the main game, and have about two hours of side missions left to you. The lack of options at this point is also frustrating. All the cool costumes you unlocked are no longer available, so you better like that last outfit, as it's the last you'll see in “free roam”. At this later point, all you'll have available to you is shooting townsfolk and causing a posse to come after you or the random bandit attack. These are a joke and can be turned away completely in under a minute. They bear no consequence on the rest of the game and are really just throwaways.

Riding off into the sunset

I tried something a little different for this review, format wise, figuring this was the easiest way for readers to access the pros and cons of the title. For the traditionalists, here are my numerical scores for GUN:

Presentation 9/10
Game play 6/10
Value 2/10
Tilt: 5/10
Overall 6/10

I can't help but question the emphasis of this game. They tried to create an epic storyline spanning hundreds of years and plot twists galore. They used orchestral music pieces and abandoned the style of the spaghetti westerns (which actually kept the western genre alive in the sixties and seventies). Yet they use over the top violence and gore (like the completely unnecessary scalping that isn't even a recorded stat), and an adult, gritty world. As such, hardcore western lovers are left scratching their heads wondering what exactly the creators were trying to get across.

I think a big failing of this game came from the multi-platform approach. There were a lot of great ideas with a ton of promise, and yet what we got is a shallow, short, and flawed title lacking focus in the right areas. But in such a small market for western fans, perhaps GUN is worth a rental. For die-hard spaghetti western fans, I would recommend picking up the severely underrated (and very cheap) Red Dead Revolver, which captures the essence of the violent western perfectly.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05