Gunman Chronicles: You'll Have More Fun Giving $40 To a Bum.
Written: Jan 04 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Someone forgot to tell the programmers to put some "pros" in.
Cons: The publishers conning you out of 40 bucks.
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| Alkaiser's Full Review: Gunman Chronicles for Windows |
Not to mention if you give the bum $40, you'll be contributing to someone who's trying to make an HONEST living, unlike the makers of Gunman Chronicles who are trying to sell this "Half-Life Skin" for $40 plus tax and shipping.
This game borrows so much from Half-Life it's unforgivable. In fact, if you Alt-Tab out of the game, the taskbar for the game will read "Half-Life". Now, I forgive that from the Counterstrike guys, who did the mod by themselves, and released it for free, but someone who trying to finagle 40 bucks out of me doesn't get anywhere near that large of a "gray area".
The plot for Half...Gunman Chronicles goes something like this. Your commander and your troop are on a mission to some planet who's name I've forgotten long ago. While on the planet's surface, you encounter a bunch of aliens who go around eating everyone. So, you order a retreat, and General Custer, or whatever the heck his name is, gets left behind in his little peon fighter, being digested because he couldn't fly a plane to save his life...literally.
So the game starts out with you taking a 30 minute tram ride. It's a ripoff of the train ride from Half-Life, with one twist...it's longer, and hence, more edgy and fun...in the same manner as having extremely long root canal surgery is just that much more edgy and fun.
When you finally get to the briefing room, your character has fallen asleep. You probably have too, so forgive him. You then find your platoon of 20 identical twins. Ok, so they're not really identical twins...they're clones...or something. I swear, there must be a whopping 5 character models in the game. After your briefing, you're supposed to go to weapons training, but, oh no!, something rams whatever the hell you're on, and you're forced to survive by using every set of combinations you could do...and so ends the really lame tutorial tie-in.
After that you get your gun off. You find out that you have a bunch of different modes for all of your gun, most of which are completely useless. I couldn't get the stupid lightning ball to ever hit anything, and when I did actually try and launch it, I stood there charging it up for longer than it takes for the last Voltron robot to form the head. Unlike Voltron, the enemies actually shot at me, so it wasn't feasible for my combat style, namely any style that has surviving the combat as an objective.
Then you proceed to the real mission, which invovles you watching all your men die, and then, surprise, surprise, Custer didn't make his Last Stand just yet. He's back, and now he wants revenge, and a 16 piece bucket of chicken. (Seasoned with 11 herbs and spices.) He needs to use you in that tired old tradition of extracting battle data for his creations, called Xenomes. (A nifty little combination of "Xeno" meaning "foreign" and "genome". It basically translates to what we in English would call "trite" or "lame".)
So you shoot everything to hell, and somewhere down the road, 5-8 hours later, you reach the end. There isn't anything really memorable in the game because it's all just a bunch of scripted events, some of which really don't make any sense, and one fun scene where you're driving around in a tank. After the one event where the scientist thanks you for saving...his Xenome, I realized there was no consequences for shooting everyone in the game, and so I did just that. Everyone dies, except me.
The game also has huge problems with clipping, or rather with not clipping. JamesWong, who holds the indignity of owning this game jumped into a box to get a gun, and got stuck. Game over, man. I opened a door, and stood too close to it. I was stuck inside the door now, and I had to reload. What the hell were the programmers doing? Probably running around thanking each other for saving their Xenomes, or something. It is my wish however, that they all have to run around looking for someone to save their jobs pretty soon.
Guns are weak. You start the game with a knife. You, the ranking officer go to defend your troop of men with guns with a knife. Later on you'll get your standard isue blaster, which you'll actually wind up using by choice throughout most of the game. All the other guns I've found so far either have some sort of delay on firing them (the machine gun has a 1/2-1 second delay, the "lightsaber" does too, and so does the rocket launcher.) or they suck. So you use your blaster, just because it actually fires when you click the fire button. Any game where I'm using my standard issue pea-shooter by choice has failed utterly already.
To top that all off, all the enemies look lame. They're either cowboys with hats, cowboys without hats, scientists with guns, robots, or some stupid Xenome. (Apparently, the criteria for "ultimate killing machine" were "needs to do flips" and "moves quickly".)
The entire game looks lame, in fact. I have trouble drawing stick men with a ruler, but I am POSITIVE that I could make better textures than the guys who did this game. I don't think I can find anything positive to say about this game. Stay far, far away from it, don't even borrow it from your friend. I want my 5 hours back, James! This is almost Daikatana bad.
Recommended:
No
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Alkaiser
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Member: Clayton Chan
Location: Irvine, CA
Reviews written: 655
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Broke the 700 pound mark on my leg lifts.
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