GUN Review

By: Diabolik

Overview:

The old west, where the fastest Gun ruled. Shootouts and gold. Whiskey and whores.

1.) Package and Artwork: 7

I personally like the GUN logo. It pops up periodically throughout the game, like on the front of the train, or hanging on a wall as a drawing. I feel that it catches the eye very well. Yellow/gold with black accents makes it stand out amongst the other games out there.

2.) Graphics: 8

I ran the game at the highest settings and it looked beautiful. I did run into some lag problems when there were enemies coming on screen. I lowered the specs and it still looked really good, and it helped with that "loading lag" problem.

3.) Controls: 8

The controls aren't to bad overall. I personally dislike the standard WASD keyboard setup on PCs, but since most of what you are doing it running forward and maybe using the action key or the lean key while standing still it is pretty good. You control turns and shooting and melee from your mouse. I found it a little hard to do rolls and things like that, but since I was hitting headshots, my enemies tended not to last too long for me to roll away from.

4.) Gameplay: 8

Gameplay is tough to evaluate. You spend a lot of time running or galloping to a town and then to your target and then back to town. Horses are available sometimes, but if you dismount during a side mission you might lose your horse and have to walk all the way back. If travel time was cut back so that you had the action back to back it would be much better. There is little to do once you select a side mission. You can't do much else besides mine gold to get you some pocket scratch. I also found that the money that the shopkeepers wanted for items was a bit unrealistic, but money isn't too hard to get while doing side missions. The main story is very good. I don't want to spoil too much, but you start out as a hunter working with your father catching food for the steamboat traveling the nearby river. The tutorial gives you all of this information, and the next thing you know, all hell breaks loose. It seems that you can go from main story mission to mission without needing to do the side missions, but to get money and stats raised you need to do the missions. There is a poker side mission that makes you play in a Texas Hold'em tournament. Now I have been learning to play at www.triplejack.com where you just play for fun (I was in the top 200 at one point). But so knowing the basics from that site, I played the computer to win some money. It was pretty simple to do. Generally the computer wouldn't make you play against more than one of its opponent's at once unless one of them has a good hand. I eliminated all but one and every time he had the small blind, he folded. If he had the big blind and I raised, he folded. It was a tedious process to do, but I didn't have to worry about losing a hand.

5.) Production Value: 9

You can see that that the production team spent a lot of time on this game. The story is engrossing and violent. The shootouts are intense. At times I would panic because there were four enemies shooting at me and I had to reload my rifle. Now I watched the making of GUN and saw a lot of the process they used for capturing the sounds and voiceovers. It translates very well from that into the game. You can tell they took their time to get this right.

6.) Story/Game Mode: 9

As I said before, the story is pretty solid. You are following up on something your father tells you to do. From there you meet up a variety of characters that can give you side missions or that will help you later in the story. All in all I can't wait to finish the story. It is actually tearing me away from City of Villains.

7.) Sound FX: 9

The sound effects are really good. The creative team went and fired the actual real guns and replicated the sounds throughout the game based on where the gun is fired in relation to where you are. The horse and saloon sound as authentic as I can imagine. There are times that you can listen to a story that another character is telling which add a whole other subtlety to the environment.

8.) Music: 9

When I first heard the music I thought they nailed it on the head. It definitely sets the mood very well.

9.) Enjoyment Factor: 9

Tearing me away from City of Villains is a hard task. This game has done it in spades. The only thing I have found that I dislike is the traveling to the next area to get some missions. It is very tedious and long. This game is third person shooter that plays very much like a FPS.

10.) Replay/Multiplayer: 6

The replayability of GUN is tough to judge. Once you finish the main story mode, it allows you to go back and finish any of the side missions that you did not finish. Besides that there is nothing to do except start showdowns in town by killing the people walking around. I racked up about 300 innocent kills because I was bored. If you get 100% complete you get the last weapon and something else that you will have to play the game to discover.

Perfect Score Combined Score : 82

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