Gun’s story centres on Colton White, an all round do-gooder who works with his father Ned hunting game for the cruise ships that run by their area. While loading their latest order onto the cruise ship, Reverend Reed and his gang of savage soldiers attack. Colton and Ned do their best to defend the boat, but it sinks in the melee. With his last words, Ned informs Colt that he is not his real father, and if he wants answers, Colt must to talk to Jenny in Dodge City. Moments later, the ship explodes, Ned is vaporised and Colton is knocked out, washing up on the beach a few days later.
First is the whore house, then the cathouse, the brothel, the bordello...
One of the main influences on Neversoft in developing Gun has been Grand Theft Auto, as the game features a sprawling countryside with a few small towns scattered around, and the player can go wherever he/she wishes. Rather than using cars for transport, Gun uses horses. While you can’t “horsejack” anyone (you’ve got to shoot them off), Gun’s horses have the same disposable nature as the cars in Rockstar’s games, which is a little unfortunate given the relationship many western heroes had with their steed. Being living creatures, you also have to take a little more caution when taking leaps off cliffs and accelerating – a horse might get a bit pissy and throw Colton off, or even die. Horses are quite handy for getting around the countryside quickly and can make Colton a lot more dangerous – you can use all of your weapons off the back of the horse, and the beast itself can trample any poor saps that get in its way.
As you’d expect for a game based in the Old West, Gun features plenty of action. There’s a reasonable variety of weapons – six shooters, rifles, shotguns and the trusty bow and arrow. Colton is always up against multiple foes, but players will find that every gun at their disposal is quite useful, even if they only stick to the six shooters and rifles. Quickdraw mode can be activated in times of desperation – the game slows down, and the player can quickly switch between targets and fire off rounds without having to aim or reload. Keener players are likely to notice that the game is very generous in regards to auto-aiming and hitboxes, which is both slightly annoying and useful at the same time, especially for those of us with issues using the DualShock 2 in first person situations. Gun actually features a rather surprising level of gore – we understand that this is the Wild West, and it wasn’t a pleasant place to be, but Neversoft have gone a little too far with the levels of gore, graphic violence and vulgarity in the game. We’re pretty liberal towards game violence at PALGN, but seeing innocent characters get their throats slashed and large chunks of cranium and cortex flying out of victims of headshots, as well as overlying misogynistic and racist themes is where we tend to draw the line - in this case it actually takes away from the overall experience.
Wilburrrrrr!
Gun’s main quest will have you doing a wide variety of different missions, from protecting a bridge from a bunch of enraged Apaches to infiltrating a mine with a rather large cannon and blasting any bastard who gets in your way. The game gives players ample opportunity to go off and do their own bidding, as well as offering a variety of side missions to undertake. These include bounty hunter missions, delivery missions, hunting, digging for gold, ranching and more. The downer is that these side missions are rather bland, and there’s never really any incentive to complete them. You do get a little bit of cash and some stats upgrades, but the improvements to Colton’s abilities are largely indistinguishable; the entire exercise feels quite pointless.
Unfortunately, the pace at which Gun’s story moves is just a little too fast – while the story missions are compelling overall, players are going to be disappointed when they see the end credits at around the five hour mark – and that includes doing the game’s side quests. It’s a little silly at times; when you get to Empire, Colton is made a deputy, at which point you’d expect to have to do a few missions fixing the town and establishing some law and order, but the developers instantly send you off into the wastes to push the story right along. To make things even more annoying, Gun never really offers any sort of formidable challenge on the default difficulty level – players are going to have to step up to the hard or ‘insane’ levels for their progress to be hindered by the enemies in the game. The sprawling countryside of Gun is quite nice until you figure out that it’s really quite bland and lifeless – there’s not a whole lot to it. Dodge and Empire aren’t exactly brimming with life, and the side missions and country side are not compelling in any way. This seems to be a problem companywide at Activision, as many of their attempts at free roaming titles (the True Crime and Spider-Man games) suffer from lifeless cities and pointless side missions with a distinct lack of variety – something must be done if the company wishes to continue developing free-form games.
A partial Village People reunion?
One of the first things players will notice about Gun are the superb production values. The game features a strong group of characters – the heroes are likeable and the villains are despicable, as you’d expect in a western. The setting of the game is especially strong – the two main towns; Dodge City and Empire City, are filled with character and surrounded by rolling plains and harsh deserts; they just aren’t filled with people. The cutscenes are filled with impressive motion capture and choreography, and do a great job of pushing along what develops into a very interesting narrative. Gun’s graphics are quite mixed; character models are well detailed and animate quite smoothly, even if there’s not a great variety of enemy types, whereas the game’s environments seem to be quick lacking in the texture and architecture departments. The game’s framerate is quite solid, with only momentary drops in times of high action. Neversoft have gone to great lengths to make Gun a great aural experience, recruiting Kris Kristofferson, Thomas Jane, Tom Skerritt, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen and Ron Perlman to do voice work and the Northwest Sinfonia orchestra for the soundtrack (80 pieces in all!). The soundtrack is more of a nod towards the Leone trilogy more than rest of the Spaghetti Western era, and feels a little too epic for such a short game, but is very good nonetheless. Sound effects are quite accurate, but don’t really stick out as much as the voice work and music.
It’s pretty obvious that Neversoft have gone to great lengths to ensure that Gun has superb presentation, but in doing so, much of the game has been underdeveloped. We’re really surprised that the experience is over and done with in just five hours, and shocked that Neversoft would repeat the mistakes of their Activision peers by offering rather lifeless cities and pointless, unvaried side missions. You really can’t hope to compete with the GTA sandbox when you don’t bring the same sort of stuff to the table. Nonetheless, Gun is a definite rental – not even the most die-hard western fan will find enough substance to justify paying full price for such a short game, but the game on offer is still worth checking out, despite its flaws.
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