Video Game Review: Gun

An old west game... how fun can that be! Well, the thought of buying this game never crossed my mind, I'm usually not into the western style of games, but since I got this one in a bundle with my Xbox 360 I thought I would at least give it a try.

There is no character creation in this game, you start off hunting a deer with a man you think is your father. This is the tutorial mode of the game where you first learn how to jump, dodge, aim and fire your weapon. A little while later in the game you get to learn how to ride a horse and there are experience points that you can buy when you have enough money to learn more skills or improve your existing skills.

Some of the skills include but are not limited to: Riding a horse, using throwing weapons such as TNT and whiskey bottles that you light on fire and throw. The game actually lights it on fire, and then you throw them, same with the TNT. There are other skills as well for using different kinds of knives and short swords like machetes. You can improve your gun using abilities as well with increased aiming ability and the ability to hold more ammo and shoot faster.

I mostly walked around the game for the first half of it, I really don't like using animals to move around, vehicles are OK, but there are no vehicles in the game besides horses. When I finally broke down and used a horse to do some of the side missions like with the pony express. There is no way you can complete those missions without using a horse, since everyone one of those missions are timed you have to use the most speed that is available to you. After using the horse for a while I got the hang of it and I have to say that riding a horse in this game is so much better than riding a horse in many other games that I played. The horse will actually go off cliffs and you and the horse will get hurt if not die. The horse has a fatigue bar, and when you upgrade the horse's abilities (ALL horses are affected by the same upgrade so there is no worrying about keeping the same horse or upgrading multiple horses).

If you ride the horse too hard and for too long the horse will drop dead and you'll be left out in the wilderness with only your feet to carry you home. Luckily there are many wild horses off in the distances so if you kill your horse or you lose it (sometimes they wander away) you should not have to walk too far before you find herd of horses wandering around.

The animal A.I. in Gun leaves you wanted a little more of a challenge as well as diversity. I came across several wolves and one bear in the ENTIRE game. The Bear is in the beginning when you have to try to say your dad from it and the wolves are part of a side mission to kill all the wolves in certain areas. The bear randomly attacks until you either kill it or it kills you and the wolves will sporadically attack you throughout the game and looking for all of them is difficult to say the least. There is a special wolf in the game that you have to kill as part of a side mission, but it took many, many times to try and kill this wolf. If you got too close to it, the damn thing ran away and you couldn't shoot it fast enough and after shooting it once it starts to run so you have to be an incredibly fast shot to actually kill the damn thing!

The sound quality is just OK and leaves you feeling like they only kind of tried when they added the music and voiceovers. The video quality was the same as the sound quality. You can see that they tried, it just wasn't hard enough... The gameplay graphics are on par with some other games, but the cinematic qualities left one wondering why they didn't delay the game a month or so and clean it up a little. The cinematic segments were a little choppy and blurry at times and it made me what to skip the scenes most of the time. The best aspect of the voiceovers is that the character swears a lot in the game. There is not a lot of variation in the swears, the main character says "DAMN!" and "SHIT!" over and over again when you are having trouble with a mission or when your character is just stressed out it seems. Maybe they programmed the main character with Tourette's Syndrome, that's what it seems like when you hear shit and damn at least one hundred times in the game!!

After many challenging side quests I decided to actually play the game and beat it. This part of the game was a little difficult, but for the most part it didn't take me that long to actually finish the game once I had started playing the main story line. For the most part I had fun playing this game and I would recommend that everyone at least give it a chance and rent it. There are some little quirks in the game, but besides the little things, the game offers many joy filed hours of gameplay once you get used to the controls and the aiming style that's a little weird at first in the game.