Only about six months ago at E3 2005, the Activision booth had a display for a new title called Gun. There was no playable code, no screenshots, not even a synopsis of the game, just the enigmatic title and a lot of guessing. Just half a year later all the questions are answered. Gun is a wild-western-themed shooter from the developer of the Tony Hawks series, Neversoft. And while the game is impressive in many ways, it ultimately comes up a little short.

In Gun the gamer plays as Colton White. Colton is at first a simple hunter working with his father, Ned, providing wild game to the steamboats plying the river. But very quickly he gets drawn into larger events that include renegade ex-confederate military irregulars, the cross of Coronado and lost cities of gold. All this is wrapped up in a constantly changing story of vengeance and lots of shooting.

The story is pretty good but it can give you whiplash. If you just put your head down and plowed through the main story missions, Gun might be about seven hours long. To properly level up your abilities and see the full variety of gameplay this title has to offer, side missions should be undertaken that will add perhaps another two or three hours. With such a short game, the storytelling necessarily has to move along at a rapid pace. What got me is that you seem to change sides with regularity and little difficulty. Sure you protected workers as they rebuilt a bridge and then escorted a stagecoach between two cities while mowing down scores of Apaches in the process, but now two missions later you are fighting along side the Apaches and they trust you entirely. You may have wiped out 30 members of the resistance but later that same day you are in their camp and cozy as can be with them. It is a bit of a reach. But this is video game storytelling, an activity that is often best participated in with the brain in neutral.

The main story missions generally involve a lot of shooting. Truth be told, the side missions also have a lot of shooting, but there are also activities to master like cattle herding if you decide to take on some of the ranching side missions or games of poker in the local saloon. Side missions are nicely varied and do reward the player with more money and items than just playing straight through the game will provide. After any side mission the player will see his personal stats in things like gun use, riding and other skills increase. You’ll also find weapons and receive money that can be spent to upgrade your equipment. The biggest problem with the side missions is that they end rather abruptly and can get rather repetitive. They also often require you to travel some distance to undertake them, and there is just not much going on between the towns. The wild west could be a pretty empty place.

The shooting mechanics of the game are adequate. The targeting system is rather forgiving, which makes up for the fact that you will often be shooting on the move and from horseback. This is especially true when using your pistols at short range. There is even a mode called "Quickdraw", Neversoft’s own version of bullet-time, that slows the action down and allows the player to rapidly rid the surrounding vicinity of bad guys with a hail of bullets.

If Neversoft got one thing near perfect in this game it was the use of horses. Like in the real old west, the use of horses is absolutely imperative to success. Horses allow the player to rapidly cover the distances between objectives. They also allow the punch and shock of cavalry when in a firefight. The horse itself is a weapon as it can be used to run down and trample enemies. Spurring a horse can make it go faster but its health will suffer the harder you ride it. The mechanics for both controlling your steed and firing from its back are well balanced. Comparing it to Far Cry Instinct’s flawed attempt to allow the player to both control a vehicle and shoot from it is like night and day. You can almost feel the intelligence of the animal as it moves. If there is one weakness to the horseplay (Sorry, had to do the pun.) it is the fact that the game is a bit like Grand Theft Equine: any old horse standing around is game to grab and use. There is no Lone Ranger and Silver or Roy Rogers and Trigger relationship where man and horse are always together, in Gun horses are used and discarded with no thought at all. This might be a good thing since you will get a few horses shot out from under you as you play. Calm down animal lovers. No real animals were harmed in the making of Gun.

From a presentation point of view the game is a mixed bag. In-game graphics are generally good, but I did run into some clipping anomalies at times. The sequences on horseback were especially nice to see. The cutscenes presented a weird mix of quality. Often they were good, but in one later scene I saw something that gave me pause. Ever see a child’s train made out of cardboard boxes? He’ll draw the train on the boxes, string them together and then slide them along the floor. In a late cutscene in Gun I swear I saw the same thing. A train pulled up with the wheels and pushrods absolutely static on the locomotive. No animation at all. With the quality of most of the rest of the scene, I found myself thinking, "How the hell did that get in there."

Sound on the other hand was always top-notch. Music, sound effects, voice acting; the game had it all. The cast for the voice acting definitely bears mentioning. The star-studded cast includes Brad Dourif, Lance Henrikson, Thomas Jane, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman and Tom Skerritt all doing a very nice job in authentic western accent. Activision spent some dough on the voice work and it shows.

I have to say that as impressed as I was with certain elements of Gun, I could not shake the feeling that this game was slightly rushed to market in order to make its ship date. The incomplete cutscene animations, the abrupt changes in storytelling, the absolute lack of any play features beyond the very short single-player mode, and one outright crash of the game, all add up to an unfinished product in my mind. How cool would it have been to have at least a splitscreen multiplayer mode set in the old west environment? As it is, after you complete the single-player game there is no reason at all to go back and play this game anymore. And since it is a full-priced, $50 game, the value is just not there.

While I can highly recommend Gun to almost any gamer to play, I really cannot recommend a purchase without a rental first. One good weekend rental will allow almost any player to get all the goodness this game has to offer. It’s a worthy first outing in the action/adventure-shooter category for Neversoft, but a rather disposable diversion in the grand scheme of gaming. In spite of that, it is my firm belief that if Activision lets Neversoft do a second Gun game, and gives them the time to polish it well, it will be outstanding.