The western – once a celebrated staple of American television and cinema, has been largely ignored in gaming circles. In recent years the genre has had a few notable western-themed games – Rockstar's Red Dead Revolver and the Japanese RPG franchise Wild Arms (well, until Wild Arms 4 went all science fiction on us), but generally westerns are left out in the pasture, replaced by endless fantasy games or generic sci-fi worlds. Seeing this void, legendary Tony Hawk developer Neversoft has stepped up to the plate with Gun – an old-fashioned, relentless, and surprisingly entertaining action game that feels unique simply because of its theme. Think of it as Grand Theft Auto on a horse – a fairly big world, plenty of missions of both story and bonus variety, and top-notch presentation even if this Xbox 360 conversion reeks of being lazily ported to the new console. Gun is a surprising diamond in the rough – a solid game to give you plenty of entertainment during those dry times…such as right now.
A tale of vengeance…and poker
Like almost every western, Gun is focused on the motive of revenge in the post Civil War era of the late 19th century – where the land is king and law is nonexistent. Colton ‘Cole’ White is a young hunter, making his bread by selling his kills to passerbys along with his father Ned White. On one particular day, a steamboat arrives for a pickup, but things go horribly wrong – a crooked preacher stages a coup in an attempt to capture what’s on board, but even that goes wrong as the boat sinks along with the intended loot. Unfortunately for Cole, in the skirmish Ned is gunned down, but not before he can tell his boy to reach Dodge City and take the first steps to getting revenge for the both of them. And so Cole begins a journey of bloodshed, brutality, and plenty of crooked figures looking to stop the kid in his tracks. There’s plenty of plot twists to keep the story going, but Gun is so unpredictable that it’s easy to predict some of the stuff immediately. Still, it’s a solid ‘modern’ western plot.
Unlike another notable western-themed game, Red Dead Revolver, Gun doesn’t stick to a linear path, guiding from mission to mission – instead, Neversoft's western follows another Rockstar game, Grand Theft Auto. Sure, the in-game area, spanning from Dodge City, KS to Empire City, New Mexico Territory isn’t as large as anything in GTA (it’s about the size of maybe Portland Island from GTA III), but the wide-open west is ripe for adventure if Cole sees fit – at least for the most part. The main story unveils at your leisure, but Gun makes sure you still follow the plot. When you arrive in Dodge for the 1st time, your options are open – either kick off the Bounty Hunter missions, tackle the Pony Express, or simply wander into the saloon/house of women doin’ it for money and continue the story. However, upon exhausting the Bounty and Express missions available at the time, all you’ll be able to do is advance the story simply because it’s impossible to leave Dodge until you get past a couple missions. Of course you can also play some Texas Hold ‘Em poker too which is where the big money is.
As the game opens up, more and more options become available to you, meaning plenty of adventure – though once again, you’re still tied to the plot once there’s nothing else to do. You could run through the main story (since it only takes about 10 hours if that) and then do all the extra stuff in a successive order, but it severely handicaps the abilities of Cole. See, completing these side missions give him better skills to handle tougher opposition later. Finishing bounties, doing duty for the sheriff or Federal Marshal, or hunting game for the Indians increase important gunplay skills. Doing Pony Express and Ranch Hand quests make you a better horseman, a necessity for numerous main story quests. Also, while you don’t get skills for it, running around the map hunting for gold to mine helps you learn the lay of the land. Besides that, both gold hunting and side-missions give out money to buy upgrades for your weapons. If you want it really difficult, by all means ignore the side-missions and hope for the best, but I’m guessing most people should definitely do all the optional stuff when it presents itself – it makes things much more enjoyable later.
It’s called Gun…hmm, wonder if there’s any guns in the game?
At the outset, Cole is equipped with a basic six-shooter and a hunting rifle, which will get him by in those beginning missions. In time you automatically earn plenty of more potent firepower, such as shotguns, sniper rifles, and even a bow that doesn’t shoot arrows but instead fires dynamite. Evil Confederates go boom! As already mentioned, with money earned from completing missions, mining gold, and pwning noobs at poker, Cole can upgrade many of these weapons with skills that increase firepower, reload speed, and bullet capacity, as only the revolvers come with unlimited bullets – which is not coincidentally why by the time you unlock special dual handguns, they become the weapon of choice for almost everything. Along with guns, Cole has a couple projectile weapons, in both whiskey bombs (better known as molotov cocktails) and dynamite. Finally for those up-close battles, Cole has some cool melee weapons, most notably a Cavalry Sword that was used by the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
Gunplay is easy to get a grasp on, though it can be clumsy at the outset. Cole can only equip two weapons at a time, and one always has to be his six-shooters. By pausing the game you can select what weapon from each class to have available, but switching to them involves holding the weapon swap button (B) and quickly choose one using the d-pad, or if it’s a projectile, one of the triggers. In a close-quarters fight, it’s a severe pain to do this since you leave yourself open for attack. Which is why relying on your revolvers is a wise idea – they have infinite ammo, are always equipped, can be plenty powerful…and are the only weapon when you quickdraw. Think of quickdraw as bullet time – pressing the Right Bumper will slow-down time, and for about 10 seconds max, you can take aim at enemies for more efficient killing. When in quickdraw you even get some auto-targeting, as flicking the left stick will move the crosshairs to the next target in your line of sight – if they’re behind you or flanking, it has to be done manually. Upon looking at my end-game stats, half my kills were from quickdraw – learn it, use it, love it. When in a bad spot with dozens of enemies, it’s the only way to fly.
On horseback, fighting doesn’t change much, but quickdraw can have advantages in this situation. When fighting other horseback enemies, the option is there to either shoot the rider clean off, or shoot the horse to gain the upper hand, and maybe even run over the guy for a trample kill (a useful tactic in later, tough Pony Express missions with Indians and bandits all over the place). Naturally it’s better to shoot the rider since that preserves the horse for riding purposes…besides, it’s a waste of a perfectly good horse, which means a waste of a perfectly good dinner says M'aiq the Liar. Once you get a horse at the outset of the game, it becomes the only logical method of transportation – it’d be like traveling a GTA city without a car. Cole doesn’t move fast enough, but a horse can blaze trails; from Dodge to Empire in mere minutes. Any horse can be taken, and it’s not theft – but you have to be careful with them. It’s possible to speed them up by spurring, but doing so too extreme can kill them. As your horse skill improves and you get some upgrades (special shoes), it becomes less dangerous and Cole becomes even faster than before. And if you can finish 100% of the game you earn a horse with infinite endurance – it’s like Shadowmere in Oblivion, only you don’t have to do dirty Dark Brotherhood missions to get him.
Generally most story missions have one objective – kill bad guys. This isn’t really a stunner but just thought I’d toss it out there. Sometimes you’re on the offensive, whether it’s escaping from the jail of a crooked mayor, taking control of an enemy fort with a bunch of Indian friends, or (my favorite) setting up a trap for a train full of enemies. Other times, you’re ambushed and have to protect a location or NPCs, and in one instance have to very carefully sneak around at night to evade the patrols of one of the major enemies. Yes, it’s a stealth mission…deal. Gun does have some escort missions, but they’re escort missions only in the sense that you have someone with you – they’re almost always capable of taking care of themselves. It’s the wild west after all, these people know how to use guns. There’s a couple frustrating moments here and there, but Gun was designed smartly with plenty of checkpoints so you can resume after almost every major in-game event. Any multi-tier mission has at least 1 or 2 continue points depending on how long said mission is. If you were to run from main mission to main mission, it’d surely get repetitive after a while – another reason to pace yourself.
There’s not a whole lot wrong with the game on a technical level – the controls, while a bit complex at first play, are otherwise solid and useful; by the time you’re to the heart of Gun, it’s all 2nd nature. It’s a tad short even when you factor in all the side-missions, but at the same time the game is surprisingly replayable since the combat is enjoyable. The AI is not super-smart but enough to offer a challenge to unprepared gamers. The game world isn’t anything super-special, but it’s designed so you can learn the area and get around without constantly hitting pause to check the map. However, one thing sticks out as a real point of frustration – the final battle. Every boss encounter is usually a shootout of sorts, almost always on a horse. But the final boss just so happens to be bulletproof – even if you line up for a perfect headshot it will just bounce off. The only tactic is amazingly obscure – the game doesn’t even hint at anything. Not only that, the final boss has a mega-powerful shotgun that can tear through Cole in just a few hits, leaving you running for the whiskey (your health) and thus exposing yourself to even more damage. The frustration level is just impossible to describe and puts a damper on what was a very enjoyable final mission until that point.
Looks that kill…on the last Xbox
Sadly, Gun is one of those games that is a hallmark of next-generation launch games in that it’s a slightly enhanced port of what was around on the original Xbox or PS2. The 360 version looks clean in HD, but it’s obvious that little care was taken to make the game look worthy of a new era of hardware. The terrain is wide-open, but by wide-open I mean barren without a whole lot going on – almost everything is static unless you hit an occasional bandit attack. It’s got some character to it, but it still doesn’t have a next-gen feel and really, it only looks as good as it does on older platforms because so little is going on. Character designs are polished and look fine but clearly come from the last generation. Plus there’s nothing but repetitive models everywhere you look. On the other hand, there’s no problems with draw distance or pop-in; granted it’s not really hard to pull that off with so little else done to take advantage of what the Xbox 360 can do.
On the other hand, Gun shines in the audio department. The voice acting is strong and lends itself well to the serious tone presented – little if any of the acting could be considered below average. However that might be helped simply because there aren’t a whole lot of unique characters to interact with; there’s a lot of NPCs that have canned lines when wandering around the cities, but that’s about it. The music is minimalist, only getting your attention at major points, letting the other sounds tell the tale, but there is occasionally a nice overworld (so to speak) theme for added effect. Plenty of authentic sound effects round things out – perfect gunshot sounds; the kind that appeared in all the old westerns. The hootin’ and hollerin’ of horses as you push them to the limit, and an accurate representation of the old-time saloons. It’s a shame the game doesn’t have frequent train routes so you can hear the toot-toot of the engine car from long distances more often.
The Last Paragraph
By default, Gun is a unique entry in the action/adventure genre simply because there’s not a lot of western games out there. Thankfully, this one is pretty good with few real notable problems aside from that little end boss garbage. The Grand Theft Auto styled world is perhaps a bit cliché nowadays, but given the design of the game, it works well and there’s plenty of side-missions to break up the main story as well as give Cole an advantage during the more complicated sections of the game. It’s a bit of a shame that Gun really didn’t materialize into a hit – unsurprising for an original franchise but sadly the potential is so high here that there’s a good chance a sequel will never develop for a next-generation platform, leaving further adventures of Colton White in the dark. Perhaps now that it’s relatively cheap ($20 for PS2/Xbox/Cube/PC, $40 for 360), Gun can finally get some attention because this is a surprising hidden gem.
New and savage ways to punish - Stealthily sneak up and attack your enemies, use them as cover, stab, shoot, or scalp them Blow your enemies away and ...More at Amazon Marketplace
Set in the untamed West of the late-1800s, GUN is a free-roaming action-adventure game that takes players to a world without laws where greed, lust an...More at Walmart
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