GUN

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $4.95

Features:

• For 1 player
• Free-roaming action-adventure set in the wild West
• Play as a vengeful gunslinger fighting corrupt lawmen, merciless outlaws and relentless warring tribes
• Side missions teach you the art of gun slinging, horse riding, and poker
• Use authentic weapons from the time, like Gatling guns and six shooters

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

AAAARGGH! [Posted on 2006-02-27]
It's dreadful. Dreadful! "Epic storyline" is so boringly confusing I didn't get further than the first mission. It was too hard. How am I supposed to shoot twenty people with something that can't aim. And why are we obsessed with guns. Oh my, it's got a bullet that can kill someone.

an excellent game with some ending problems [Posted on 2006-03-01]
what i mean here is about 3 and a half stars which in my little scheme of things means the good pretty clearly outweighs the bad and i recommend it with a bit of enthusiasm. 4 star games are very rare for me and this game made a good run at it. i can't even imagine a 5 star game. i've come to think there are too many inherent problems in games for 5 stars.

anyway, ahem, this is about gun. a very nice game i looked forward to a lot. i played it just after it came out and hopefully havent forgotten too much about it.

the positives:

graphics! this seems to be a bit controversial as some people complain about them, but frankly i sometimes think people overrate realism and detail. gun's detail was not like, i dont know, half life 2 or something. i didn't repeatedly go "wow, unbelievable todays technology!" but i really enjoyed them. they were pretty to look at, they set the scene well and they were extremely refreshing- bright, colorful, open western vistas instead of dark, gloomy, tense, industrial, claustrophobic and filled with horror creatures and commandos like, i don't know, 95% of all shooters. it was lovely to ride my horse around spotting buffalo and hot springs and such. i appreciated that quite a bit.

difficulty: well, i can't remember if this game had difficulty levels. but i like difficulty levels and make a bee line for the easy choice! i do not like dying! even if i can reload right away, and i am not too great at these games. well, so, up until the last part of the game (more about that later) i had no real problems and generally felt clever and talented but not coddled and unchallenged. the poker was too easy though and i could not get the hunting and gave up on it part way through (i thoroughly completed everything else).

characters/voice acting: pretty good characters helped by superb voice acting. i don't want any spoilers here so i'll just say the quality of the characters was let down by the storyline, but i still liked them. and they looked pretty good to me.

gameplay: it was quite fun and varied. it had some of the best bullet time ever (called quickdraw or something). i loved how you could flick target to target with a single button which not only made me feel more impressive but also raised the speed of mowing down enemies in a way that made it less ridiculous that i was beating 11 people in a gunfight. the horse riding was done very well and it was nice to pony express. i liked that poker was in it though found it a bit limited, and both the ranching and mining were really nice and helped fill out the world and the variety of things you do.

length: i may be an exception, but the vast majority of games go too long for me. the feel of them and the things i do in them become redundant and i don't finish, so i like that gun seemed manageable. for the most part i was pleasantly full when i finished though perhaps finishing things was a little too cut and dried, like the way you can get every upgrade possible.

the negative:

story: it should have gone a bit lighter, i mean, it seemed to think it was some powerful clint eastwood directed western but unfortunatly computer games are not capable of pulling off anything nearly that sophisticated. they just have too much on their plate vis a vis gameplay and choice. the cutscenes and acting were nice, and it started solidly, but storywise it progressively deteriorated, or i guess was completely unable to fufill its set up. it gets a little hard to discuss without spoilers but, well, more romance would have been nice and the boss battle that goes on and on was not just difficult for me (remember how i hate that!), but it was irritatingly stupid, and senseless to the reality of the game.

conclusion: wow, only one big negative, but the huge, long, ending boss battle really bugged me. really, good game though. oh, and by the way, i have a pretty midlevel computer (and fading fast) and didn't have any real technical problems, maybe a couple of ugly frame slowdowns, but mostly it was smooth. that's just, you know, for what that's worth.

anyway, if some of what i am talking about makes sense to you go try this game out.

Bad Ending [Posted on 2006-03-15]
I thought the game was fun and challenging. i did not like the ending. what was with the wolf? i liked the gold mining option, wish there would have been more gold. i did expierence the slow down when there are more than 4-5 enemy gunman on screen. all in all it was an ok game.

Keep your expectations low and you'll love it [Posted on 2006-03-21]
First off, MAJOR kudos to Activision for releasing this game and defending its content from the politically sensitive wussies out there who have forgotten (or never knew aything about) American history.

On to business:

The game is playable and works well, but it has lots of problems.

The movement and aiming is just downright strange. It's not 1st person - you hover around your character like you're a spirit having an out-of-body experience, and movement of your mouse swings you around your character. I can see getting motion sickness or headaches from this. It is difficult to aim and shoot like this, and you have to go into quickdraw mode to go FPS. Quickdraw, by the way, feels like a cheat mode because it slows everything down and you use buttons that will aim for you. No challenge.

The engine and movement is great, but the graphics are terrible for a game that just came out in 2006. Think Quake 3/Return to Wolfenstein here.

Sound quality is ok. But characters and spoken dialog are done so cliche and sappy that it's almost intolerable. Indians with distorted, monster-like faces? Bad guys with scars and eye patches? And what's with this Chris Christofferson guy being your dad at the beginning? I kept on expecting to see "Blade" (Wesley Snipes) jump out from behind the bushes in a black cape with a sword.

There's also graphics clipping that is really annoying. I should not be able to walk through things. And when I shoot a deer, the other deer should scatter, not just stand around like that monster Kentucky rifle I just fired had a silencer on it.

Speaking of rifles, I know what it's like to shoot a muzzle-loading kentucky. It takes at least 30 seconds to reload a single shot. I also know the difference between a lever-action rifle and a shotgun - something the developers and documentation writers apparently don't.

The bear attack was really well done, however. Lots of other elements of the game are as well, such as the challenges you face and the elements of old west and things long since forgotten (like actually shooting an animal instead of trying to protect it, etc). The biggest thing this game does well is in-your-face wild westness. You shoot indians, whip your horse to death and shoot animals. If you're a wuss, stick to minesweeper and solitaire.

The story, ideas, characters, activities, are really all quite brilliant. EXCELLENT game idea. Implementation is somewhat overly exaggerated to the point of being sappy and laughable. You will not find the wild west in this game. What you will find is a poorly made western "b" movie that would cause you to get up and walk out if it was up on a movie screen. Taking part in it, however, is what makes it tolerable.

3 stars for game quality.

4 stars for Activision having enough guts to crank out a game like this in today's politically correct, neutered, spineless, wussified climate.

5 stars for Activision actually refusing to apologize for releasing it when criticized for it by people who sit around with nothing better to do than looking for new ways to be offended.

got console-itis? [Posted on 2006-03-28]
This game was a little disappointing after reading a review of it in a pc game magazine.

The graphics are really weak yet I still got impressive frame rate slow downs never experienced with the much visually superior games of Far cry or half life 2. The sound is fine although I don't have surround sound so couldnt judge that. I turned the music off pretty promptly. You can save anywhere which is a plus, but if you die you are restarted from fixed starting points, so you'd have to reload a game to start from your save point.

The gameplay itself is entertaining enough but very very console-ish. There is some autoaim and very little challenge to hitting your target at the normal level of difficulty. The horse riding element is well done but gets tedious when you find yourself riding back and forth across the map several times to finish a mission. Much like driving for 20 minutes of real time in the GTA series. The side missions are repetitive but necessary to get cash and stat buffs. There are not enough cool upgrades to buy. Like GTA there are vast territories to ride around in, but not very much to do. Almost all building are just facades, and most of the ones you can enter have nothing to do in them. A western themed MMORPG would be cool.

The cutscenes are not particularly well done graphically although the voice acting is fine. I felt there were too many cut scenes and these interrupted the flow of gameplay needlessly.

Anyway, it won't change your life, nor give you any chills or true thrills, but it serves as adequate diversion for a few hours.

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