GUN

When you mention Neversoft the first and only thing that comes to mind is Tony Hawk; now that you know who Neversoft is, let me introduce the next step in Western video games. Their new beauty is of course Gun, the Western shooter set in 1890 where corruption is everywhere and the only person you can trust is your Gun. So what exactly does Gun bring to the Xbox 360? Is it a brand new game or just a re-hashed Playstation 2 port? Let’s find out.

The game is set in the great American West of 1890, where no one is your friend, including the law. Shootouts come and go and each day you will find yourself in constant peril. You play as Colton White and are on a mission to find out who killed your father and also to wreak an unimaginable amount of pain on a character known as ‘The Reaper’. The story itself does what it needs to and keeps you playing; you are always wanting to know what, why, when and who comes next in the storyline, and because of that you play non-stop – even if it makes you fall asleep only to wake up six days later to find you’ve completed the game and that the world has come to an end.

In the gameplay department this game is split in half, on the one hand you have a great quick draw system and you also have the fun of shooting someone in the leg and watching them cry with agony while you then go behind them and put one right through their skull, I know its nothing new but it’s always good to see a game like this pull it off so nicely. Then there’s the bad side of things, on the whole the gameplay makes life far too easy, you have an auto aim which makes it so you can randomly take a shot and blow someone’s head off. I first saw the problem at the very beginning of the game where you have to shoot these little birds and out of about 20 birds I must have missed 19 and yet they were all dead, at one point I aimed at a bird and managed to shoot another that wasn’t even on the screen – this got me a little worried. The game is set in the third person view which makes for nice gaming.  You have a knife for close combat which is actually fun to use. Overall the gameplay could have been vastly improved; in some ways it’s the worst aspect of the game, but it is also contains some of the best aspects of the game (get your head around that one).

Graphically the game looks nice, it looks much better than the original game by a large margin, this is especially so if you own a high-definition television.  The cut scenes look very nice and they are easy to follow, the characters also look very good but even though the landscapes are vast and beautiful they could and should look better on the 360. Horses and carts look very realistic for example and the movement of the horses is very lifelike, but things like fire on the other hand, should have been enhanced to make it look a little more lifelike.

The best graphical aspect hands down is looking down your gun barrel and the detail on your weapon, they must have spent more time on the gun view than on every landscape in the game; it really does look that good. This can make up for some of the sub-par graphics, as you will find yourself looking down your gun barrel 99% of the time. This game is a gore fest so let me be the first to warn you; right from the start you have to shoot wolves, slash Indians to bits and see a woman proceed to have an axe lodged in her skull, so this game is really not for the faint of heart. The blood is good in parts, but over the top especially when using the knife. Also the fact that you can blow someone’s head clean off with a shotgun is very gory, but even so it does look kind of cool. Overall the graphics are nothing amazing but are still a step up for people used to the graphics of the original Xbox.