I guess I would be contradicting myself if I said I wanted a good Western game but never played Red Dead Revolver. Alas, I didn’t. After a handful of poor genre titles, save LucasArts’ Outlaws, I had given up my chance to be as cool as Eastwood in High Planes Drifter (or Unforgiven or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or, hell, Kilmer and Russell in Tombstone). Gun seemed to be what I was looking for in that it was not just a Western game, but one that would let me play out the role I wanted to play. It turns out that wasn’t the case, but it did manage to be an enjoyable game despite numerous flaws.

I don’t want to brag, but I’d like to think that I’m the best fake son Kris Kristofferson ever had. While his in-game character didn’t come out and say so, I inferred it purely from my sheer desire to hang out with the man. Gun hit me in the heart right off the bat by having the likeness and voice of said imagined proud father, then nearly sealed the deal by having the tutorial include him showing me how to use the controls by hunting and then assisting in taking down a bear. In an effort to use my god-given right to exaggerate, I took down a grizzly so large that I needed my paw’s super fancy gun. Yeah, the game started off just right.

The story is a bit more extreme than it could’ve been, involving an ex-Confederate squad searching for a city of gold that the Spanish had found and the aboriginal peoples had kept a secret. You’re out for revenge, and your search will unravel a tale spanning hundreds of years, but only two towns.

Taking place in and around Dodge and Empire City, Gun allows you to divert from the main story by taking on any number of side missions.  Successfully completing these missions results in increased abilities with automatic point allocation, as well as cash to buy upgrades and goods from town merchants and Indian traders.  I’d say that the missions aren’t varied, but they are pretty solid for a title taking place in fairly desolate locations in the Old West. Aside from the omnipresent Fed Ex delivery missions, you’ll also be able to act as a Deputy, riding around towns and dispensing justice, escorting carriages, protecting besieged travelers, as well as going after wanted criminals.  Whenever a mission is accepted, the game puts you in middle of the scenario and lets you go to work right away, which often involves getting a horse to ride out of town. Whenever you decide to hunt down a criminal, you have to track them down and defeat their henchmen. Criminals can be taken dead or alive, though a lot of fun is to be had when you try to take them while they’re still breathing.  The hunt usually involves the fun process of blowing guys off their horses, shooting horses out from underneath people, and also shooting a criminal’s legs to subdue them without killing them. What’s strange is that you’re often left stranded after these missions, left to walk back to town or to track down a wild horse.

The horses are a tricky bunch, and slightly symbolic of the game itself. They are fun to use, and offer unique gameplay elements in that they cannot be ridden too hard or they will die, but they can also be used to take damage and trample enemies. Riding them involves mastering the rhythm for maximum speed without seriously hurting them, which is both convenient and a bit exhilarating. But then you have the random occurrences of their disappearance after the missions, and the lack of opportunity to take a horse and become more accustomed to it and train it for better performance. You also have to dismount the horse in order to talk to people and to read wanted posters, which tend to be outside, so there are a lot of superfluous steps along the way.  The fact that you are given an entirely new horse at the start of a mission even though you already had one beforehand makes the entire experience feel fragmented. While the throwaway approach isn’t necessarily important, aside from a potentially cool gameplay element going to waste, their disappearances are the kind of weird things that happen throughout the game world.

As you progress through the story and meet all the shady characters and partake in an unapologetic look at the times, you’ll gain access to new weapons, enhance your abilities, and go on all sorts of adventures, but you’ll also run across some severe problems.  Aside from the murdered couple who inexplicably froze in mid-fall and the horse that was halfway in the rock, one of the biggest problems I had involved the timely arrival of a rifle. I was fighting a boss that didn’t seem to be overly difficult, but I just couldn’t beat him. I was using my quickdraw ability (where time slows down to allow for more accurate shots – a great way for you to think you’re an awesome shooter) to devastating effect, but he simply would not die. After several retries and then several more, I accidentally hit the “restart the mission” button on the failure screen. I finally turned the game off and returned to it some time later, but upon loading the game, I suddenly had a powerful rifle that made quick work of my foe. I had just wasted over an hour in a futile attempt to kill someone that wasn’t capable of being killed with what I had because the game simply didn’t work as it was supposed to. 

Along the way to your revenge, you’ll run across characters voiced by the likes of the aforementioned Kris Kristofferson as well as Lance Henriksen, Ron Perlman, and Brad Dourif, all of who do a great job with their roles. The lesser characters are also voiced well, making the cutscenes a bit more compelling and lively. It’s a shame that the world outside of the cutscenes isn’t so lively, with desolate towns seeming inhabited only when a random gunfight breaks out. With a wince, I can take the towns not being bustling with activity, but when there are only two towns in the game, one would hope that they would be made to feel a little more alive.

Despite the fact that you can continue playing through side quests after completing the game and earning a really nice gun left by the final boss, Gun isn’t very long. The side quests are fun to play for a short while, but it doesn’t take long to buy all the items and enhance yourself to the point where tasks become mundane due to your prowess. Playing through the game once is a good time, despite the anomalies and flaws; it’s hard to deny the appeal of shooting someone off their horse or jumping into a group of men, wildly swinging a knife. There are also small details that make the game great, like buying a scalping knife and giving your foes some excessive comeuppances, or having the impact of a well-placed shot feeling nicely visceral. This is a violent Wild West filled with prostitutes, shootings, and gambling, and oh so close to being just right.

Overall: 6.5/10

Gun is one of those games that you like despite the flaws, which are so apparent and aggravating that you’re just not sure what to do. On one hand, you enjoy wandering about the badlands, taking up your pickaxe to mine gold and finding criminals to hunt down, but on the other you hate having to track down a horse after a mission because yours vanishes, or fighting an un-winnable fight for over an hour because the game decided to not work. It’s short, it’s not polished, but it’s fun.