Gun – Review Xbox - Activision

Gun – Review XBOX

Gun, Review Xbox

Experience the brutality, greed, and lust of the wild, Wild West.

Activision releases a new Cowboy themed role player that goes by the name of Gun. Gun is developed by Tony Hawk team Neversoft. Neversoft have taken inspiration from the classic Spaghetti Western movies of the 70's in which life in the West was a gritty and dangerous struggle to survive.

Gun sees you in the role of Colton White, a Clint Eastwood-esque gunslinger with a grudge to settle. Colton's mission sees him travel from his rural home with an aging hunter named Ned (voiced by Kris Kristofferson) deep into the dangers of Dodge City and beyond. In a time before laws the only law is the Gun. Explore within a free roaming environment reminiscent of a cowboy version of GTA. You get a third person view of the action and the camera work is all pretty good. To survive you must straddle the line between good and evil in a showdown against corrupt lawmen, a murderous preacher, renegade army psychopaths, merciless outlaws and native Indian tribes.

The game opens with some training; this is done nicely with you spending time hunting with Ned. Here you learn how to ride, aim, shoot and the rest. This is also a great introduction to the setting and the characters. Ned is killed, when an incident on a barge goes wrong and Colton is sent off to the city to revenge his master's death and find out the secrets of a mysterious chest.

The cut scenes in Gun are fantastic and show off some of Gun's great vocal acting. This gives the game a hugely cinematic feel and you are sucked into the story just like you are watching a movie. When Colton reaches Dodge City his journey begins. Each cut-scene opens up the next element of the mission and they are so cinematic that you will be looking forward to seeing the next one. Colton finds him self crossing the line of the law meeting and working with a diverse cast of characters in his effort to revenge Ned's death.

Controlling Colton is easy. The third person view works well and the shooting is well balanced. You get to use all kinds of different weapons throughout the game from; a bow and arrow to shotguns, pistols, rifles and even dynamite. You also get to do some horse riding and even riding and shooting at the same time. Do you shoot the man or the horse? Either way the effect is pretty impressive. There is also a slow mo mode that happens in shoot outs this only adds to the whole cinematic thing.

With all this shooting going on this must be a violent looking game? Well yes it is. Maybe even more violent than is actually needed, you can literally blow some-ones face off. Blood and guts are everywhere and I found the game even gorier than some of the worst war titles out there. If you think the best western movies are blood baths then you haven't seen anything yet.

So, the game-play is engaging and the graphics and sound are very strong but the main problem with this game is it doesn't last long enough. At first the free roaming game-play gives the impression that the world of Gun is massive but it isn't. Unless you take on the side missions which can be tricky sometimes and depending on how long it takes you to master the final Gun battle there isn't enough game here. You will be able to complete the game in much less than 10 hours which for me isn't enough. If the journey was a longer one and some of the logic was a little tighter then Gun would be a masterpiece. Not many games have done justice to the subject matter of the Wild West. Gun does this but it is all over far too quickly. If Gun 2 has the same depth of character but a more expansive mission with a few bugs ironed out we could be looking at a total classic.

8 out of 10

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