Life in the Old West must have been gritty, violent, and short if it was anything like Gun, a new Western-themed action adventure from Tony Hawk series developer Neversoft. Featuring an open-ended environment that you can traverse on foot or on horseback, plenty of gory shoot-outs, numerous optional side missions, and an interesting story, Gun initially seems like a 19th-century Grand Theft Auto.
Unfortunately, the experience just doesn’t last long enough to be savored. Gun’s main story missions are exciting, but the main plot is over so quickly that the whole thing just ends up feeling rushed, and the various side missions aren’t compelling enough to hold your interest after the end credits roll.
So it turns out that a terse, simple title like “Gun” is really the perfect fit for what could have been a great game, if only it had more meat on its bones. Colton White doesn’t take long to exact his revenge on the unsavory customers who made his life difficult.
Gun is the tale of Colton White, a soft-spoken gunslinger raised by a resourceful old hunter named Ned, made instantly likable thanks to an excellent voice performance by Kris Kristofferson. One day Ned and Colton’s hunt lands them on a steamboat carrying some sort of important artifact that Ned seems to know about.
However, he’s not alone in his knowledge, and as the ship is besieged, Colton barely escapes with his life. He makes his way to Dodge City at Ned’s request, and from there embarks on a journey that will put him up against a greedy ex-military railroad mogul and his wicked cohorts.
There’s a strong cast of characters in Gun, and the 3D cinematic cutscenes are impressively motion-captured and choreographed, making each story mission worth looking forward to if only to see how Colton’s misadventures will continue to pan out.
Colton will find himself on both sides of the law, allying with a diverse array of different comrades in his efforts to find answers and seek vengeance. Unfortunately, the story hurries along at a breakneck pace.
Situations that seem intended to introduce entire chapters of gameplay tend to be resolved almost immediately. For example, at a certain point, Colton is deputized as a peacekeeper in Empire City, the game’s largest town.
You expect to then undertake a series of sheriff-style missions, but Colton’s career path very quickly goes sour as the story jarringly goes in another direction. It blazes on like this until the end credits roll–maybe six hours after you first begin play, depending on how many side missions you opted to take on and depending on how much trouble you had with the final battle, which is one of the only tough fights at the normal difficulty setting.
There’s just no time to really get to like (or dislike) the main cast. The mechanics of gameplay certainly are good, and even though there are only a few main story missions, they tend to be diverse and packed with intense action.
Gun carefully walks the line between being a run-and-gun shoot-’em-up and more of a realistic, tactical shooter. You get to use all kinds of different authentic weapons, including pistols, rifles, shotguns, sharpshooters, bows, and dynamite in order to take on vastly superior odds, which Colton can overcome because of his excellent marksmanship and his ability to instantly recover all his health by drinking from his flask (what’s in that thing?).
Controlling Colton primarily from a third-person perspective, you’ll also get to take on feroc.