A fan of westerns for more years than I can remember, a game that promised cowboy gun-slinging action with the freedom of GTA, and coming from Tony Hawk’s developers Neversoft, GUN just had to be for me. The story takes place in untamed Montana & New Mexico in the late-1800s, where greed, lust and murder are rampant (nothing like now then). From the off it’s obvious that Neversoft have employed some serious voice talent for the game and The Punisher star Thomas Jane plays Colton White (that’s you), Kris Kristofferson is Colton's mountain man father, Ned, and the list goes on; Tom Skerritt is Resistance Fighter Clay Allison, Brad Dourif is evil preacher Josiah Reed; Ron Perlman is dodgy Mayor of Empire, Hoodoo Brown, and Lance Henriksen is excellent as the tyrannical nutter Thomas MacGruder.
The movie quality doesn’t stop there as a twisted story of betrayal, greed, and revenge unfolds that’s probably better than every western movie since Unforgiven way back in 1992. Penned by Hollywood screenwriter Randall Jahnson (Mask of Zorro, The Doors) the story drives you along, although GTA-style you can break off and chill out with side missions such as bounty hunting, gold mining or being a ranch hand. The quality extends to an excellent main theme by videogame soundtrack veteran Christopher Lennertz, performed by the Northwest Sinfonia using an 80-piece orchestra - you’ll be humming or whistling it for days...
One of the first things to strike you in just how good the animation of your horse is, and the way it handles too. Leaping aboard (you press ‘Y’ so it’s like entering a vehicle in GTA) you control your gee-gee with the left stick and look/aim your weapon with the right, so it’s just like Halo’s Warthog in that respect, so we’re off to a good start controls-wise. You can make the horse walking slowly, canter or gallop or even give it a real whipping for a brief turbo-boost with the ‘L’ button, although repeated use of this could kill it (there’s a gauge to let you know how knackered it is). You can even use a horse as a weapon or battering ram and make it rear up and trample people, buffalo, cougars or wolves with a press of ‘X’.
Sometimes you horse will get shot by enemies and you’ll be left rideless; fortunately wild horses are dotted around the plains here and there, but occasionally you’ll still lose your ride for no apparent reason at the end of a mission and have to walk for miles to find a replacement nag, which as you can imagine, can be a real pain. This horsey mortality might be realistic but it means like with GTA’s highly disposable cars you don’t really form any attachment to your ride, which kind of goes against Colton White’s ‘mountain man’ character and my own personal cowboy ethics. Disappointingly you can’t round up wild horses or even hitch up dead bad guys’ and take them to town and sell them either – a missed opportunity I reckon.
You collect a large selection of authentic-looking weapons throughout the game (including a melee weapon like a knife or tomahawk) but can only carry two guns at a time, or three if you have dual pistols. You can swap between these with a tap of ‘B’ or change weapons in the pause menu by sorting through your ‘saddlebag’. You draw and fire your weapon by pressing the right trigger, reload with the left click, and put it away with a tap of down on the D-pad. Clicking the right stick swaps to first person aiming with the rifle or pressing the ‘R’ button activates GUN’s party piece; ‘Quickdraw’, its version of Max Payne’s “bullet time” and Red Dead Revolver’s “Deadeye” aiming. This slows down the action and allows you to pull off some real sharp-shooting feats (you can aim manually and flick between targets with the left stick in a similar way to Call of Duty 2), as long as your Quickdraw gauge has something in it – in turn this is filled just by shooting bad guys and can be extended like all your other abilities throughout the game, adding a light RPG element. Pleasingly, GUN is fairly graphic in its portrayal of what happens when bullets hit things, blood spurts from wounds and if you hit someone n the head chances are you’ll remove a large section of skull and brains. Like a lot of reviews have stated, after an initial period of gun-toting joy, GUN’s incessant violence can get tiresome though, and this particular cowboy would have enjoyed more ranch hand missions and suchlike to add some much-needed variety
Yep, strangely the violence comes a little too thick and fast, and you can’t even ride from one area to another without getting attacked by (really crap) bandits. The side missions don’t last long enough and gold mining, that I thought could have been am interesting distraction in the same way as Elite’s asteroid mining or Zelda 64’s fishing, amounts to nothing more than finding shiny rocks and hacking at them with a pick axe, and Pony Express missions are no more than races from one spot to another – oh dear.
Also this particular plot-driven game could drive you to the point of distraction, with a message constantly nagging you to continue the story – why? – you only get all the upgrades and cool weapons if you do all the side missions, and it’s not like the game is the longest out there - if you’re playing it on ‘easy’ and are easily bullied by on screen instructions then you’ll finish it in a few hours. You then have the freedom to go and finish all the side missions (that you ignored because you got nagged into finishing the storyline) and unlock all the upgrades and weapons that you now have no one to use them on – bizarre game structure-o-la all over again. Why the f-heck in so many games do you get the best guns/cars/abilities right at the end, so you hardly get to use them?
Apart from some annoying structuring, GUN also has a few other niggles that I’d hoped would be left behind on the last generation of machines, like pop up and clipping, but despite looking beautiful (in a wild west kind of way) at times, GUN never looks any more than a hi-res PS2 game. Like a homage to GTA and Drivers most annoying bits, another stupid niggle crops up in too many of the missions as well as you’re chasing someone and it says “you’ve lost them” when you can still see them, or they’ve just galloped around a corner – Aaargh!. GUN does have some imaginative boss battles though, although I’ll never quite understand why a game that has you blowing someone’s scalp off one minute can suddenly give a chief bad guy a bullet-resistant head. They don’t suck as much as some game’s boss battles, but they do sap some of the believability out of the game, something they spent a lot of effort building up.
GUN may be short-lived, but I love my westerns and it has a quality story and lots of enjoyable blood-soaked gameplay. It’s a more traditional and authentic tale than Red Dead Revolver’s wild, weird west, and allows a lot more freedom too – it’s just a shame that the play area isn’t even bigger and there isn’t more to do when you tire of shooting stuff (and you will).
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