6th January 2006
Gun
Yeehaw!! The Cowboy games are here!
For the most part the games I have experienced on the Xbox 360 have been starkly next generation in their look and feel. Most of them are not original concepts but they look damn nice. These games have obviously aimed for something visually superior to their predecessors and have achieved significant success doing so. But what of the games that are designed to be accessible on all the current console systems. Are the similarities between the 360 and the current Xbox that lets us play old Xbox games a curse in disguise? I hope not, but one look at Gun has me paranoid that developers are going to rehash their Xbox software, increase the resolution, add online achievements and call it a day.
Truth be told, Gun is a great game in the fun department. The major drawback and it is obvious from the first second you play the game is that you don't appear to be playing an Xbox 360 game at all. It is very possible that old Xbox games (Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2) look better graphically than this game does.
The concept of the game is actually different from what I thought it would be from the title. I expected a generic first person shooter not a Wild West game. Western games have not been done very frequently in video games the most recent besides Gun being Red Dead Revolver. While being a fun game, Red Dead Revolver is really not a fair analogy when considering Activision's new cowboy game. Where Red Dead Revolver was a simple shoot out game with barely even a story line to tie it all together, Gun is a full-scale western story with cowboys, Indians, good guys, bad guys, horse handling, ranching, gold mining, and whorehouses. The latter are tame by today's video game standards and are filled with low-poly mannish looking bunnies that even Austin Powers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.The game starts off as all games should with an in game story starter and tutorial. In this, you meet your father a game hunter in the Rocky Mountains. He explains how to use the movement features and the basics of Gun slinging. This includes how to aim, shoot and reload as well as how to use one of the game's most useful features, the Quick Draw. Over time, you build up a stamina meter and can use the Quick Draw to slow down time with your six shooters and even quickly switch between enemy targets. The feature is quite cool looking and highly effective when you get jumped by a bunch of bandits at one time.
After bagging some deer for trading you proceed with the story that takes you across a ferry to two different towns a mining area, mountains, canyons and lakes all crisscrossed with railroad tracks. Of course to get around a map so large you need a horse. These are found roaming around the map and are quite a blast to ride. The mechanics of the horses are very realistic looking. Using the analog stick, you can trot, canter and gallop. You can slide to a stop, jump fences or run down unsuspecting foes. They have health and can be ridden too hardly and collapse.
When you finally get into the towns, there are several side missions and stores you can use to increase your stats and buy weapon upgrades. You get gamer points for completing all of these missions so there is extra incentive to save the family from attacking wolves, run errands for the pony express or herd cattle for the local cattle rancher. All of these activities extend what would without them be a relatively short game.The most fun for me were the horse rustling and hunting side missions. In the former, you talk to a rancher and he teaches you how to use your horse to nudge and guide some rascally calves into a pen. Later you have to rustle more cows and you have to do it out in the open. Sometimes you even have to protect them from wolves or bandits. It's all in a day's work if you're a cowboy though.
If you talk to an Indian hunter, he will give you clues for how to find the elusive predators that all braves must hunt to become men. You follow the clue to the location where the hunter says the animal roams. You sense that he's close so you drop off your horse and bend into a crouch. Eventually you see him, sneak up to within a lethally accurate range and try to shoot the unsuspecting beast in the brain for an instant kill. Pretty much anything else doesn't drop him and he runs off to be hunted another day or in another area.
As you proceed through the game's story, you find newer and more powerful weapons including shotGuns, bows and arrows, sniper rifles, dynamite and an especially gruesome scalping knife that you can use to scalp your enemies once they are nearly dead. This is of course a bloody proposition and has no actual effect on the game so you can decide for yourself whether or not you derive enjoyment from slicing people's foreheads off. I personally could have done with out it, but considering the main character's affiliation with Indians, it seems at least plausible from a character point-of-view.The bow and arrow is used in a couple of nifty stealth missions where you have to escape from a heavily guarded encampment. It's the typical find the horses then we'll meet you out back sort of deal and mixes up the game play and adds some effective theatrics as well.
There are boss fights at the end of every episode and each one usually results in your possession of a new or improved firearm. None of them are what I would call difficult on the normal difficulty, but I had my share of continues.
In short, I found the game play, the setup the whole collection of game elements to be quite appealing. This game is fun to a large degree. There were some technical issues that bothered me though.The first is the save game system. It kind of bothered me that regardless of where you happened to be or what side mission you were working on, loading your saved game takes you back to the exact location you were at when you passed the previous episode. I'm pretty sure this is automatically saved for you so I'm not sure what the save option is there for.
The second is the gamer point configuration. I don't want to be accused of being a masochist so I wont claim that gamer points need to be gruelingly difficult to get, but this game makes it so easy to get them that it devalues other games. It also sort of emphasizes how short the game actually is.
But the game at its core is a solid concept. The game play is a lot of fun, and there is a reasonable amount of stuff to do in the wild world that is the game's setting. Like I said before, the graphics are not 360 caliber at all. It is rendered in high definition, but it doesn't look like they actually worked on the models or textures when bringing it out to the 360. It's disappointing to be sure, because when you get right down to it, this could be an absolutely excellent game. With better graphics and a tad longer story this game might have been a contender game of the year in some category or another. As it stands though, Gun is a fun game and you really should try it out even if only as a rental.
