You know, I never grew up as a kid playing Cowboys & Indians like my Dad did. I was one of the first members of a generation to grow up with video games – we had the first Nintendo on our block and, by golly, that Nintendo was taken to various houses where my parents played it more than I did. Little did I know that, in the future, I’d be able to play Cowboys & Indians like my dad did, just in a virtual world.
Gungives me a chance to step into the shoes of Colton White, a badass cowboy in the Wild West, complete with outlaws, saloons, gunfights, horse riding, Indians and, of course, lots of whiskey. You’re going to have various, well, guns to play with too. You’ll always have your trusty revolver at your side and throughout the game you’ll find a selection of pistols, rifles and shotguns. There are also a few non-gun weapons – knives, a tomahawk, bows, dynamite and, my personal favorite, whiskey bombs.
Enough on the weapon selection, though. The actual world where you get to play with these weapons is a good size and is filled with a ton of side missions, regular story missions and other activities. The story in Gunis one of the best I’ve seen in a game this year. I haven’t felt this urge to push on in a game for a long time – I wanted to see a bit more of Colton’s story.
You see, it starts off pretty normally. Colton’s ‘father’, Ned, is taking Colton hunting. You’ll learn the basic controls of the game here as you hunt down some elk, shoot some quail, and take down some wolves and even a bear that seems to really want to rip your guts out. You’ll see a steamboat passing by and get on – and this is where the story really takes off.
On the boat, you find out that Ned isn’t really your father. In natural dramatic storytelling fashion, it happens after you are pushed off of the steamboat while Ned makes a last stand before the boat blows up under an assault from a ‘priest’ and his buddies. You’ll wake up three days later and really get the game going.
After you wake up, you’re going to get to experience another really fun part of the game – horse riding. Now, Neversoft could have taken the easy way out and made horse riding a simple way to move faster in the game. They didn’t take the easy way out, though. Horse riding is actually a very fun aspect of the game that I found myself taking part in more than I expected.
See, horses are pretty darn slow and dumb unless you push them. Pushing them, though, can end up killing them (hey, I wouldn’t much like having spurs jabbed into my sides, either!) but will make them go faster. You can run over your enemies on the horse and can also shoot while on horseback. Note how I said that you can shoot – I didn’t say it was at all easy. I had the hardest time pulling it off but, when I did it, I felt much more like an actual cowboy, even though I did manage to kill a significant amount of horses while I fine tuned my riding abilities.
Shooting is actually pretty easy in this game – far easier than most console shooters out there. The auto-aim type system is pretty forgiving and the quick-draw ability (something like bullet-time with automatic targeting) makes taking out mobs of enemies a piece of cake. For someone who typically has a hard time with console shooters, I was actually able to make headway on the harder difficulty levels. Granted, I wasn’t able to actually beat them but I was able to make some progress.
The game’s storyline is quite linear – you aren’t going to wonder what you have to do next. The game also makes it pretty obvious as to what the side missions are. You’ll have multiple types to take part in, too. You can try to track down some outlaws to make cash, run for the Pony Express, become a deputy, go mine some gold, do some ranching and hunting and play poker. The game definitely gives you a lot to do in the way of side missions and these really go a long way to extending the time you’ll spend with this game. The side missions will also increase your stats, though, really, I enjoyed them just as side missions and wasn’t as worried about stat boosts.
Sure, you may be able to beat the game fast. However, you’ll find yourself wanting to play the game on higher difficulty levels to get more missions and even going back and playing through again to better your abilities in missions you’ve already beaten. You may decide to go back through and just use a horse to take down baddies or use nothing more than your dinky little knife. Maybe you’ll play a completely straight-edge Colton and not deal with that evil devil whiskey.
No matter how you play, though, Gun will present you with a ton of fun challenges. Early difficulty levels will allow people that aren’t as good at shooters to hone their skills and experience the story (*raises his hand*) while the higher difficulties will further enhance your skills and give you even more side missions to play with. Gun is one of the most enjoyable games that I’ve played this year. The game isn’t perfect – I wouldn’t mind more to do in this world, for example – but it is really close. I’d love to see Neversoft give the genre another run, either from Colton’s perspective again or set in a different time period. I know I’ll be eagerly awaiting that game after playing Gun.
As I'm currently living off a student budget, my recent purchases tend to be from the various budget ranges of older titles: I'm more likely to be found playing Quake II or the original Unreal Tournament than Thief III or FarCry. I'll probably make an exception for Doom 3, though. (For the record, I did try Doom 3, and wasn't very impressed. Thief III has made it to the budget range here in the UK, and one day I'll play it. Perhaps after I've updated this profile properly...)
I enjoy online games, but I prefer the persistent world offered by the MMORPGs to the competitive environment of the CounterStrike servers. I've a feeling too many years of leisurely RPG playing have ruined my shooter reflexes; needless to say, I tend to end up on the tail end of the scoreboards in online FPS games. That said, I enjoy the competitiveness of multiplayer gaming, but prefer the face-to-face encounters of LAN gaming to the anonymity of the public servers.
