Tweaking the weapon modes seems like a novelty at first, but it quickly becomes a nuisance. You'll realize that you're spending way too much time toggling back and forth between settings in order to find the best combination for dispatching an enemy. Eventually, you'll ignore this feature altogether and just stick to each weapon's default setting. It would have made much more sense to simply offer a standard and alternate mode of fire for each weapon. Even if these wild choices were reduced by half, the arsenal would still remain quite manageable. But as it stands, the weapons system in Gunman Chronicles is just frustrating.

The other main feature of the game, the ability to drive vehicles, doesn't get exploited to its full potential. As it is, you'll get to drive just one vehicle throughout Gunman Chronicles: an invincible tank with a powerful gun. Unfortunately, you're rarely given the opportunity to use this machine's massive firepower, as the only enemies you face during the tank sequence are standard foot soldiers, which can quickly be dispatched with the vehicle's machine gun. Also, these tank missions are set up in a manner that forces you to constantly leave the tank so that you can solve a series of puzzles necessary to clear impassable debris from its path. These puzzles are easy to solve, and they involve fighting your way to a switch or lever. In fact, save for the last handful of levels, the entire game is relatively easy, and it'll take you no longer than 15 hours or so to go through it from start to finish.

Gunman Chronicles' multiplayer option doesn't do much to compensate for the lack of a significant single-player campaign. While finding a server using the game's integrated matchmaking utility is a breeze, the only multiplayer game modes available are deathmatch and team deathmatch, which isn't much when you consider the huge variety of free multiplayer mods available for Half-Life, such as Counter-Strike and Firearms.

The graphics in Gunman Chronicles use the aging Half-Life engine, which is now more than two years old. Some of the enemy models, especially larger ones such as the alpha species and the brontosaurus, are quite impressive, and they boast not only a relatively high number of polygons, but also some of the cleanest textures you'll find in any Half-Life mod. The level design varies significantly across the four distinct areas in Gunman Chronicles, which makes it believable that you're actually moving from planet to planet. Unfortunately, most of the levels are lit with a garish amount of red, green, and blue lighting, which ruins what's an otherwise aesthetically pleasing game. Also, in the outdoor levels, the textures used for the sky are of very low quality and resolution - they aren't convincing at all.

The game's sound effects are as mediocre as the rest of Gunman Chronicles. Most of the shrieks and yells of the aliens sound believable enough, as do a few of the game's weapons. However, there's little variety in the different sound effects, and, as a result, they tend to get repetitive relatively quickly. Additionally, a lot of the ambient sound effects in Gunman Chronicles sound just like those in Half-Life, and the game's voice acting seems a bit timid and muffled compared with the rest of the game's audio. Gunman Chronicles lacks any music, save for a techno number that plays while the end credits roll.

While Gunman Chronicles introduces some new gameplay conventions - such as the customizable weapons and controllable vehicle - that weren't attempted by the original Half-Life, it's nothing that prior user-created mods like Chemical Existence haven't done before. And even though it's worth considering that this game was essentially developed by a group of amateur designers, it still sells for the same money that you'd pay for anything else, and there are many first-person shooters available that are much more worthwhile. In fact, there are user-created mods like Neil Manke's They Hunger series, which are just as good as, if not better than, Gunman Chronicles - and they can be downloaded entirely for free. Gunman Chronicles is certainly a solid effort by its developers, and large publishers should continue to encourage this grassroots movement among upstart development teams so that they can create similar near-professional quality games - but this one should have been kept as a free download.