GUN (2005)

In 2005, Neversoft, the company most known for their Tony Hawk skateboarding games released GUN, a third-person western shooter. Unfortunately for Neversoft, a different company, most known for their open world GTA games, released Red Dead Revolver the year before, and I remember the comparisons being in the back of everyone’s mind when reviewing Neversoft’s title. As a PC gamer, the argument was moot – RDR was console-exclusive. But the comparisons still contributed to a general feeling of GUN being second best. As an ardent fan of Lucasarts’s 1997 western FPS, Outlaws, I still wanted to give GUN a try, and I finally picked it up in April of 2014, a few months before Neversoft closed forever. It was $5 on Amazon, and I used a gift card that I probably got from internet reward searches.

GUN, like Neversoft’s Tony Hawk titles, is not exactly rough around the edges, so much as smooth around the edges. It sacrifices detail for framerate, and eschews accuracy in favor of gameplay. The entire world is about the size of a decent theme park, and crammed into that space is Kansas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and all the landscape of the 1800s in between including hoodoos, valleys, plains, mountains, rivers, canyons, and mines. Since the game is relatively short, the size of the world is actually very apt, and you don’t see the same location too often unless you’re also doing all of the side quests.

I feel like the designers had a list of everything they wanted in a western game and crammed as much of it in as they possibly could. In my first four or five hours, I had ridden horses, gotten into gunfights with (heavily stereotyped) Native Americans and other bad guys using pistols, rifles, and shotguns, caroused with whores, got deputized, rode a riverboat, trampled people and aggressive wild animals on horseback, raced a horse, protected a group of Chinese laborers, mined gold, drank liquor, cheated at poker, herded cattle, hunted bounties, got betrayed, lied to, and nearly killed numerous times, and finally got thrown into prison where me and my fellow inmates staged a prison break. A number of those things are one-off story moments, and others are things you’ll be doing a lot of, but GUN does manage to bring a lot of fun western tropes into its presentation. Being set in the 1800s though, some parts of the game feel heavily racist, but the main character has a generally good moral compass on that front.

Technically, the game ran very well most of the time on my Windows 7 machine, after using a widescreen fix and controller mappings from the Steam community. Your mileage may vary… I do remember the mouse cursor being way off from where it was actually focused in the menus, but once you get your controller mapped, this isn’t really a problem. Also, I definitely recommend using a controller for this game. This would be one of those games designed in that era where PC was something of an afterthought. Aiming may have been easier with the mouse, but there’s some auto-aim happening too, so it doesn’t matter too much once you get used to it.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Lucasarts’s Outlaws, but have never played any of the Red Dead games. GUN’s pretty great in comparison, but doesn’t quite have the heart that Outlaws did. I feel like traversing the story in GUN because it’s just plain fun, where in Outlaws I wanted to get to the end because it was important to the main character. But Outlaws is very dated now, probably hasn’t aged well, and isn’t (yet?) on Steam. Also, I not only completed the story for GUN, but even took an extra four hours to finish all of the side missions (HLTB times were actually accurate for once!) and completed the game to 100% because I just wanted to play some more. So, on PC, GUN is definitely not a bad choice for getting a western fix. Maybe play the Outlaws soundtrack in the background though.

P.S. Don’t leave the animal hunts to the very end – they’re one of the few things without a waypoint.
P.P.S. Save often, just in case.
P.P.P.S. You can drift your horse like a car.

Also…

Beat Party Hard Go on Android.