Gun Review

Gun is a Wild West-themed action game from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater developer Neversoft. You’ll explore a wide open world where you can be a bounty hunter, a rancher, a miner, or just hunt animals among many other things. And you’ll get to shoot a lot of bad guys. Literally hundreds and hundreds of them. The gameplay is surprisingly fun and satisfying, but there just isn’t enough of it to make Gun worth much more than a rental.

Story

To tell too much of the story would be a great disservice to players, so I’ll keep it brief. You play as Colton White, a young gunslinger whose adopted father is killed while trying to protect an important artifact being transported on a steamboat. Colton sets out to discover the circumstances of the attack and finds he is now a part of something much bigger. Overall, the story in Gun is amazingly well written and is told through some nicely choreographed cutscenes. Unfortunately, it is all over far too soon. You can beat the main story missions in a mere six hours. Instead of a marathon like the great story deserves we get a 100 meter dash and the overall experience definitely suffers because of it.

Gameplay

It is unfortunate that the game is so short because the gameplay is amazingly fun and satisfying. At its core Gun is a third-person-shooter, but it is much more than that. The standard point and shoot gameplay of a TPS is here and surprisingly solid, but you can also jump into a first person perspective called QuickDraw mode where the game slows down and you can quickly cycle between enemies and send a lot of lead flying their way. As you play you’ll earn new weapons such as shotguns, rifles, a bow with different types of arrows (regular, flaming, dynamite) and you can also use hand weapons such as knives and tomahawks. What is interesting is that with each new weapon you earn the game steps up in difficulty just a little bit which forces you to make use of all of the tools at your disposal to proceed. The gameplay itself is very fast paced and the game throws dozens and dozens of enemies at you at a time. The frantic nature of the gameplay combined with the smooth difficulty curve and the solid mechanics all add up to a very fun experience.

Giddy Up

Another key area of the gameplay in Gun is that you can ride a horse and shoot while riding. Somewhat like Grand Theft Auto but with horses rather than cars, any horse you see can be ridden and there is no sense of ownership. Horses are merely tools in this game which is somewhat disappointing because you never get attached to them. I can’t help but think of how much Epona added to Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Agro added to Shadow of the Colossus. It just seems like a missed opportunity in Gun. With all of that said, riding horses has never been done better than it is here. The horses are very agile and actually do what you want them to but at the same time you can’t run them too hard or they will literally die on you. Shooting while riding is also very well done and far easier than what has been attempted in other games.

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