I had a lot of fun with Gun, but I also found myself constantly wishing that the developers had done more with it.
Everyone has noted the extreme shortness of the game, and they are not wrong. If you plowed through playing non-stop with few side missions, you could probably finish the game in about 5 hours. Even doing all the side missions it doesn’t feel like it extends the life of the game.
I have come to the conclusion that this is due more to the size of the game world which, all things considered, ends up seeming really, really small. In GTA, if you drove from one end of the city to the other, it might take you a couple of minutes. In Gun, you can ride from one end of the Game World to the other in less than 60 seconds. There are two major cities, Dodge and Empire, and the first time you have to ride between the two, it seems like quite the journey. This ends up being due to the fact that they send you on an amazingly circuitous route and you’re being harassed by enemies the entire way. After you get to Empire, you discover that there’s a very straight shortcut set of train tracks that leads directly between the two and it only takes seconds to get from one to the other.
The net effect is that all the quests regardless of their location really seem like you’re just crossing the street to pickup the mail (and in fact, more than half of the quests literally do just send you right across the street which somewhat detracts from the immersion factor). Even the quests that send you searching out in the wilderness just aren’t that grandiose in nature or duration. The upshot of all this is that everything in the game seems quick, short, and close.
This is a third person game. No FPS action here except when you go into zoom mode, or quickdraw mode. I’ve read complaints from other reviewers about clipping and slowdowns and again, they are not wrong. I’ve experienced some fairly bad graphical corruption and clipping as well as some extreme frame rate drops on a P4 3.4Ghz with a 256Meg Radeon 9800. Unfortunately, reducing all the graphical settings to their minimums _does not really help these frame rate problems_ - so this is not completely a question of lack of horsepower.
If they do end up making a sequel I would request three things: Larger Game World, an FPS toggle option and a more optimized graphics engine.
Now to the good: Combat is pretty fun - especially when you pick up the nuances of quickdraw mode (think Max Payne Bullet Time) and purchase some of the better upgrades from vendors. It’s very satisfying to face off against five enemies, slam into quickdraw mode and cap all five of them in a row like something right out of A Fistful of Dollars. The large variety of weapons is also pretty cool, although it ends up being somewhat superfluous as you are constantly receiving better versions of weapons and once you get them, there’s no reason to go back to the earlier models you were using before (although you can do so if you wish). The characters are also fairly well done and the voice talent is good. The soundtrack is appropriately western – but not Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western – instead you get the sprawling John Barry overtones found in movies like “Dances With Wolves”. I’m thinking they should have gone with the former, but that’s probably just me…
All in all, I had a lot of fun with Gun, but I just found that I was constantly wishing to myself that the developers had done more with it.
If you love westerns and lament the lack of this particular subject material in the Video Game arena, then you will probably love Gun. If you are looking for the next great Western game to replace Outlaws… Gun tries hard, but… you’ll have to wait a little longer.