GUN: Eyes-On Impressions & First Footage

We get a detailed look at this all-new western-themed adventure from Neversoft and Activision. Read our impressions and check this first helping of luscious media.

When we reviewed Rockstar's Red Dead Revolver, just over a year ago, we made note of how few Western (as in bang, bang) games there were, and how the theme as a whole seemed underused. Fast forward to July 2005, and the situation is not dissimilar. There are however a few games on the way that tread on the dusty Midwest roads of Gold Rush America of the 1800s, but none is as determined to accurately recreate the period as Neversoft's GUN.

Earlier this year, the Tony Hawk and Spider-Man developers teased E3-goers with impressively pervasive publicity for the new game without actually showing anything for it, so we were intrigued when Activision invited us to a secret location to admire faux whores, drink Texan beer and see what was possibly the best-kept secret in games.

The parallels with Red Dead Revolver are inevitable, which is part of the reason why Activision and Neversoft have been loath to speak about Gun. But while Rockstar's game took obvious reference from the best (and worst) that Western movies had to offer, Neversoft has snubbed them as sub-par and chosen to base its latest game on Cormac McCarthy's seminal novel of Western plundering and pillaging (not to mention scalping) - Blood Meridian. The goal for Neversoft was simple: to recreate the Old West as accurately as possible and to drape an exciting, enthralling and violent freeform game over it.

They certainly seem to have the look right. The windswept dust road that runs through Dodge City (one of the locations we were shown) made us feel hot and thirsty just looking at them. Graphics are serviceable but nothing extraordinary at the moment, and though there's an Xbox 360 version in development, this will likely not take advantage of all that Microsoft's new machine has to offer - in large part due to Neversoft's concentrating on the PlayStation 2 version instead.

You play as Colton Wright, a block of a man with a suddenly complicated past. Our demonstration began with the game's opening scene where Colton's father is shot down and, before passing on in elaborate cowboy fashion, gives Colton a coin and tells him that he's not his real father and that he should go find a whore named Betty in Dodge City. This sets in motion the main story in which you'll deal out hot, leaden justice to your ersatz father's murderers as you try to discover who you are and where you come from.

But while the story may be well fleshed out (we didn't see enough to tell), it does serve as a good skeleton to layer with an orgy of Old West violence. Most of this takes place on foot and uses a third-person perspective and seemingly first-person controls to mete out rapid-fire gunshots using a range of authentic weapons. Neversoft is still fiddling with the balance, but each of them will have their own characteristics, including power, accuracy and reload speed statistics. There are also a variety of melee weapons to choose from, allowing you to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies to slice their throats amid a fountain of satisfying jugular spray.

But the weapons you'll be spending the most time with are your six-shooters, which provide a reasoned medium to the other weapons. As a bonus, the six-shooters allow you to enter a bullet-time-like mode, making it that much easier to nail those all-important headshots. Enemies (apparently human, but we're not quite sure) are surprisingly tenacious and withstand several shots from lesser powered weapons, but a well-placed rifle shot will bring down just about anything.

A fair bit of the game takes place on horseback too. Here you'll have independent controls for the horse and aiming, giving you a lot of freedom in how you go about killing evildoers. Neversoft has focussed on getting your steed's controls right and with the animations to match. Importantly, horses (yours included) have their own health gauges, so you can choose whether to take out mounted cowboys by shooting them immediately or by sending their horses crashing to the ground, thus making the task that touch easier.

And yet there's more to Gun than just standard run-and-gun parts. You'll oftentimes be given the option to take on missions of other types. One we were shown involved you allying yourself with a tribe of Indians (while wearing suitable Indian garb) to bring down a barricaded cavalry outpost. This also provided an opportunity for our demonstrator to show off some of Gun's other weapons, including dynamite and Gatling guns. In case it's not clear, much like the novel that served as the game's source material, Gun is brimming with violence.

At the moment, there's a lot to like about Gun. The atmosphere of the game seems spot on, and the visuals and the stereotypical-yet-perfect twangy Western music make for a believable world in which you want to spend time. It's much too early to tell how much there is to do in the game or how much freedom there is in doing it. We also haven't had a chance to play the game and we're interested to see how Neversoft has coped with a game that's radically different from anything the company has done before. But the core concepts are looking good. If the remaining months of development go well, Neversoft could be on to another winner.

Gun will be out for PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and Xbox 360 this autumn.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games