Paul and I sampled Gun on the original Xbox when it was first released. I've never been much of a western guy myself, but I wonder now why it is not a video game genre used more frequently. There is great untapped potential here that I think Gun has tapped very well.
First off, genre aside it has a great voice cast including the talent of Thomas Jane, Kris Kristofferson, Lance Henriksen, Brad Dourif, Ron Perlman and Tom Skerrit. I'm not one to believe that star power can make a game, but bad voice acting can ruin a game. Definitely no problem here.
Secondly, the game has a solid third person shooter engine. As a lot of the action this genre had begun to do at the time of Gun's release, there's a slow-motion "bullet-time" mode called "Quickdraw". When you get surrounded by guys or need a precision head shot when an enemy is holding a hostage, activating this can do the job. You can
Quickdraw slows
down time around you to make more precise aiming.
Colton is a pretty
tough cowboy.
Thirdly, you can boost your stats by doing side quests and earning cash to upgrade weapons, health and abilities. The side quests vary from Pony Express, Wanted Posters, Texas Hold 'em Poker, Ranch Hand, Hunting, Deputy and Federal Marshal missions. Nearly every Wanted Poster has increased rewards for apprehending the criminal alive or by other special circumstances. You can also get cash from mining the 44 gold locations hidden all over the map. I did keep track of side mission availability and the gold locations here.
Even being a port, it looks beautiful on 360 in high-definition. Textures and backgrounds look great. Character models are the only thing that could be considered less than wonderful.
Finally, the central story and mission flow of the game is entertaining with a colorful cast of characters and objectives. Gun does a great job of keeping mission activities fresh and not repetitive.
A few glitches do rear their ugly heads. Every once in a while I would be in the middle of a mission, clear my objective, and it wouldn't progress. Not sure if maybe I did something too quickly or was in the wrong spot when I did it. One particular instance was in a Ranch Hand mission. I was helping the rancher move his herd to Dodge City when we were attacked by rustlers. My objective was to kill all the rustlers. When that was complete I went to the X marked on the map to cotinue and nothing would happen. I went all the way to Dodge by myself to see if he would follow and nothing happened. I ran all the way around that place to make something happen. Nothing. I guess it's a good thing to carry
Ride any horse you can find, or kill a rider and take his.
dynamite with you to end those types of missions. (There is an "End Mission" option on the pause menu, but TNT is way more fun and you don't have to restart the entire mission, just that phase.)
Which brings me to another point. Anytime you die in the middle of the mission, you're restarted at what is generally a checkpoint that is very close to where you just were. Sometimes merely between waves of enemies a checkpoint will occur. Overall, I think it makes this game too simple. I went through on Normal difficulty the first time through opening up all side missions, maxing the stats, finding all the gold to get all of the acheivments on 360 and reached no hangups. There's an acheivment for completing each difficulty level so I blew through on Easy without needing to do a single side mission to boost stats. Granted, with Insane difficulty the quick checkpoints would come in handy because it is pretty insane.
One thing that would have been better too is to have all side quests available whenever you want. Instead, only a few open at a time as you go through the main story. I guess it's to keep it balanced and not get your stats too high, but also forces some linearity.
The only other complaint I have is a little bit of the production quality of the non-playable characters. I'm not quite sure what it is that bothers me. I love Tony Hawk games but Neversoft seemed to have trouble with the mission givers at THPS4 and beyond, just making them look stiff and unreal and this game is plagued with the same problems. Just seems like this is something that could be fixed by now. The starting and finishing of side quests just feels thrown together and not polished.
Gun is a fun game. Some day I might tackle the Hard and/or Insane difficulty to finish up the acheivments. There are a lot of Adventure elements that accompany the third person shooter genre, making it difficult to choose the rating criteria for this game, but I believe the core element of the game is a Third Person Shooter with the Adventure part there as decoration.