Darwinianevolution

User Score
6.0

Presentation - 7.0
Gameplay - 7.0
Value - 4.0

Many media tend to center around certain settings and genres during long periods of time. Modern media such as film and television require a vast array of materials and set pieces to create a believable environment to tell their stories on, which is something that greatly affected the popularity of certain productions over others. One of the most famous cases of this is the Western genre: based on XIXth century America, the conquest of the Wild West offered a lot of spectacle and human drama with relatively low production costs. Most of this stories were based in the west side of the USA, so there’s plenty of desert to film, most of the settlements in the West were rather small, so they saved up on actors, the sets were rather easy to build and, perhaps more importantly, to reuse without any fuss or complain. The popularity of westerns would last for decades, until it reached a point of full on saturation, where the film industry just sort of abandoned the genre, chasing other more popular trends.

In contrast, other media suffer from very different limitations. Videogames have thrived in areas where their ability to create worlds from scratch had more space to grow, such as fantasy and the science fiction genres, and as such, never really tried that much with the western genre. For the longest time, the most popular videogame centered on the Wild West was “The Oregon Trail”, an educational game that represented fairly well the struggles of people trying to cross half of the United States in wagons to find a place to live at the end of the journey. It would take until the creation of “Red Dead Redemption” in 2010 to bring the style of the westerns of old to the video game scene. It, however, was not the first. Leaving aside Red Dead Redemption as a sequel of Red Dead Revolver (who even remembers that one?), there were other action westerns, and probably the most important one until 2010 was Activision’s “Gun”.

Gun is an action-shooter game created by developer Neversoft and published by Activision in 2005. Between 2005 and 2006, it released for almost every platform that could handle it at the time: PC, PS2, Xbox, Game Cube, XBox 360 and even as a re-release for the PSP with added content. The version I’ve played is the Steam version, so I won’t be talking about “Gun: Showdown”, that content is PSP exclusive.

The game centers around Colton White, a man who hunts for a living, selling meat and fur to the local steam boats alongside his father Ned.  During one of their travels through the river, the steamboat is ambushed by mysterious individuals, resulting in Ned’s death and the complete destruction of the boat. Colton barely makes it out alive, but before Ned died he told him certain things that spurs Colton to travel around the West in search of answers and vengeance. The plot is quite straight forward after that. Colton travels from town to town, finding allies and enemies alike along the way, fighting bandits and Indians by the dozen, all while a not so shadowy puppeteer is chasing him, centered in his own search… The story is all right, and the characters, for the most part, are entertaining. Some of the ones I liked the most end up dead too soon and some of the ones I liked least died too late, but that’s part of the course for this kinds of stories. Some of the set pieces are quite generic for the setting, though. I don’t think we would lose that much if they had skipped the herding part of the game. Likewise, throughout the story, the game offers you constant side missions, allowing you to win gold to improve your arsenal of guns, but some of them become repetitive quite fast. You can only catch so many bandits for rewards (getting them alive is best, they gave you extra money for that) until you get bored. Some are fun, though, trying to keep the peace as Sheriff’s assistant in a limited amount of time makes you wonder why is the town suddenly embroiled in full on chaos. There are also missions that are just bizarre, like bringing food to a man that lives two steps to the nearest shop, or else he dies of starvation. He’s not even crippled or invalid, he’s just fat (that’s the actual in-game explanation, by the way). Why did they even bother with this one? It’s memorable all right, but it’s the dumb kind of memorable.

As you progress through the story, the narrative unfolds through the use of cutscenes. They are decent by the standards of their time, though they’d probably be looked at funny nowadays, some of the expressions are too over the top. To be fair, the game clearly goes for an over the top style and story, with bad guys that are irredeemable bastards and good guys with the tragic backstory that makes you feel instantly sorry for them, while also unapologetically using many standard western tropes without adding that much to them. A bit schlocky, but it’s serviceable, and besides, the story can be beaten in less than 10 hours, so it’s not like it’s wasting your time anyways.

Mechanics-wise, the game is a 3^rd person shooter most of the time. You can use a lot of weapons, from pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, bows, burning cocktails, dynamite, machine guns and cannons (although these two only in specific set pieces…). The game offers you the quickdraw, a mechanic that allows a slowing down of time, allowing you to make the shots way more precise, to get all the headshots you could possibly want. Considering that, on PC, you use keyboard and mouse, this ability is extremely broken, allowing you to use this slow down way more efficiently than on consoles. This can translate into some parts of the game becoming quite easy, and the ones that can’t be solved with this method are either damage sponges or have such a strong damage output that you can’t just get out of your cover without risking death in a couple of shots. It’s also limited to the handguns, so forget about using it with your rifle against enemy snipers, you won’t do that much against far away enemies. You can also ride horses in this game (shocking, I know), and use them as weapons to trample enemies. You would have to find empty areas of the map where enemies group up unrealistically close to be able to use it to its full potential, but it’s there.

The game also works as an open world game of sorts, and it has the same problems this kind of games suffer from. The West we’re shown here is quite empty, and divided into different setpieces (fortunately loading times have been trimmed down, so you don’t need to load to go from location to location). While this is impressive, the land is empty as, well, a desert.  The wilderness offers you little outside hunting game and the occasional gold mine. The few towns you can find are scattered and have little to offer you outside of the previously mentioned side missions. There’s also the problem of the lack of fast travel, so you will ride on horse for a decent chunk of this game. The game is linear enough as it is, so giving you no fast travel option is probably there to force you to travel and to do a side mission or two. And once you beat the story mode, there is little to no incentive to keep playing, other than full completion if you care about that kind of thing.

Music is not memorable. Though it tries to follow the typical western sounds, I cannot remember a single track from the game, which is a shame, Westerns have produced some of the most memorable tunes out there.

There’s not much to say about the game, except one last pet peeve of mine. Without making too many spoilers, the showdown between the final bad guy and you in the gold mine is probably one of the weakest boss fights ever. The game goes against everything it has taught you at the time, and forces you to throw explosives at geysers to try and hurt the armored and completely untouchable bad guy, who does not go close to the geysers enough to make reliable damage to him, all the while he can blow you up quite easily with his gun. So once you spend way more time that’s worth to damage him in the first phase, the second phase of the fight is just the quick draw to blow up dynamite he throws at you in the air. Quite a letdown, if I do say so myself.

With Red Dead Redemption 2 coming soon, it’s fun to see the games that tried to do what it’s now a pretty stablished formula, and do it with the knowledge and resources they had available at the time. While it’s still fun and impressive by its time, its lack of content and sort of generic story fail to elevate it to nothing more than a stepping stone to better games.