Gun

"Where's the rest of it?"

Everyone loves the Old West. Gunfights, lynchings, prostitutes, cattle and Indians: what's not to like? You'll be seeing a lot of all of those in Gun (except lynching). It's great fun, implements old ideas well, and includes new ones at the same time. However, there's something (or rather, a lot of things) missing...

Story: 8/10

The story is old. Very old. And yet in this game, it's brilliant. There's nothing unpredictable, and no shocking twist towards the end, and you can probably predict what's going to happen an hour into the game. But the way it's told is what makes it so effective. You start out the game hunting with your father, a simple mountain-man who sells the animals he hunts to passing steamboats to make a living. Of course, shortly after boarding the steamboat with your latest haul, things go horribly wrong. Over the course of your journey, you'll befriend prostitutes (as above), Apaches (as above), rebels and just for a change, lawmen. The various characters have strong personalities, and it's easy to find yourself forming definite feelings for them one way or another. There are two problems with the story though. First, it's all over too quickly. It moves along so fast that sometimes it's hard to get a real feel for any of the characters before they're either dead or unimportant. Second, it's so stereotypical, it's hard to take it seriously at times.

Graphics/Sound 8/10

The game looks pretty. Very pretty. It's a shame that the game's setting demand that it be quite so brown all the time. The cities in the game (both of them) break the scenery up nicely, with buildings to look at and townspeople to admire. The character models are pretty good, on the whole, especially in the cutscenes. Also, given the game's reliance on guns (suprisingly), the effects of them are satisfying. You can blow limbs off with a sharpshooter, decapitate with rifles, and send people flying with dynamite. The scenery is pretty sharp, but there's nothing to look at outside of the towns. They're good, but there's no variety.

The voice acting in the game is excellent. The voices fit the characters perfectly (except the priest: I couldn't hear his voice without thinking of the doctor from Deadwood. Not that it was a suprise.), and they can usually portray genuine emotion. The music is fairly forgettable (when there is music) but you probably won't mind over the sound effects of the pitched battles you'll be in every ten seconds or so. The guns all sound loud and meaty, the dynamite sounds pleasantly explodey, and the enemy voices are as good as the characters'. The sound is probably the best thing about this game.

Gameplay 7/10

The important bit. Gun is, at a basic level, fantastic in this respect. It's a game about cowboys, so you'll spend your time doing cowboy style things. Riding horses, shooting people, shooting people from horseback, shooting people from a distance, herding cattle, shooting animals, and so on. Shooting, switching weapons, rolling and aiming are all simple, but they still feel interesting. You get an on-screen cursor which allows you to target enemy body parts individually and take them out that way. The enemies for most of the game are pretty much cannon fodder: some of them with rifles even come close to shooting straight. Regardless, it's fun to be able to blow people away with such ease. The horse-riding (which you'll be doing a lot of) is just as simple to control, and just as fun. You can leap fences and shoot from the saddle, and even spur your horse to death if you so choose. Very nice.

The problem with it is, at times, it's just very, very easy. You have a canteen full of whiskey which you can use to restore your health instantly. Even at it's lowest upgrade, you have enough to fully restore your health four or five times. Enemies go down very quickly with headshots, and you can even enter a slow-motion "Quickdraw" mode, which gives you an auto-aim abillity and massively powerful bullets. You can buy upgrades for your weapons and health restoration, but you probably won't need it. You're given a better weapon every half hour or so, which is usually more than strong enough to kill whatever you're fighting. The final problem with the gameply is the difficulty curve. Having made the first few hours a walk in the park, the last part of the game gets inexplicably, much harder. While it makes the game more challenging to suddenly have enemies who can fire a shot every two seconds with perfect accuracy every time, it subtracts from the sense of realism in the game. It feels a little unsatisfying, not to mention annoying, when you can be murdering with impunity one minute, and torn to pieces by bullets the next.

Lifespan 4/10

Oh dear. This is the one, major, serious downfall of the game. It lasts a few hours, at most. I completed it in under seven, doing a good number of the sidequests in the process. It's for this reason that the game seems somewhat hollow: the game doesn't get chance to develop. The world in the game is fairly massive, with no loading times between areas, but there's nothing to do in it. There are two cities, and a few other minor settlements in the game, and you visit each one for the duration of one or two missions. In GTA, for example, when you went to a new area, the first thing you would do is find someone to work for. After that, you would do a number of missions for that person, slowly building up an idea of their character and yours, and having a damn good time along the way. Eventually, there would be a major missions in which they betray you, you betray them, they introduce you to a new person or area of the city, and you progress on to the next set of missions. In Gun, there's none of that: it's straight to the storyline missions. For example, at one point, you join a small band of rebels outside of the law. You'd expect this to open the door to many sabotage, assassination, or theft, or pretty much any sort of sub-mission before the main story continued. But it's only one mission later before you're heading in another direction. There was a lot of potential for Gun: if only it could slow down...

The side missions are presumably in the game to make up for the rapid storyline. Unfortunately, they don't do a very good job. Partially, they're repetitive, and you know what to expect: take a pony express mission, you'll be riding a horse quickly. Take a bounty mission, you'll be killing someone. Some of the Federal Marshal missions verge on inventive, but they still only last about five minutes at maximum. The side missions are all incredibly short. This is not a problem in itself, but the missions actually feel like they're over too soon. You can continue to play the game after the end, but other than picking up any lumps of gold or side missions that you missed, there's not really anything to do. There's no incentive to start a new game either.

Conclusion: 6/10

It's a real shame that Gun doesn't have more to it. If it did, it would be brilliant: as it is, it just feels slightly hollow. It's definitely worth renting, as you can be sure that you'll have completed it by the time you have to take it back.

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