I think I may have enjoyed Red Dead Revolver more. I just went back and perused my review of Red Dead Revolver (PS2) and I had a surprising amount of cheer for it. Gun, in direct comparison as Wild West games, is far more bland... an amnesiac drifter of an experience while RDR is focused and stylized.
This revelation surprises me because Gun should have been the better experience. Open environments, GTA-style mission-based gameplay, slicker graphics. Instead, the forgotten, sorta low-rent Red Dead Revolver - even as a linear, level-based adventure with a short game clock - stands out as doing more with less, rather than doing less with more.
Gun follows the tale of Colton White, who is frog-marched through plot points like a perp on trial. There's a dev quote (I think it came from an interview in Nintendo Power) where somebody says that they were under orders to keep all the cutscenes under two minutes. And they talked about this like it was a huge feature, because Gamers Everywhere (tm) always smack buttons to skip in-game movies.
They're right. Lots of people get impatient and/or have no interest in the storylines that eager video games foist upon them. I think people like that are simply playing the wrong types of games... if you're constantly skipping cutscenes, get the fuck back into arcades where you belong. Don't even waste your money buying a Metal Gear or a Zelda. There are plenty of great games that concentrate on the action without spinning wheels in a plot. I'm not maligning those games at all - I loves my Soul Calibur - I just hate to see people like that being treated as the majority audience.
Because the damage done to Gun by this attitude is palpable. All these interesting things happen to Colt during the brief movies, and then you're dumped back into this big empty gameworld with absolutely no momentum. It's a weird feeling. Gun lifts a lot of freeform gameplay from Grand Theft Auto, but GTA knows better than to play every scene like an action serial. There are action sequences, sure... but the pacing of GTA is much more slice-of-life. What crazy crap will happen to Gangster Me now... will I go after a storyline mission or a sidebar mission? And when you trigger a mission in GTA, it is more-or-less self-contained... so if you choose to disappear into Taxi Driver missions for a week, it doesn't feel like you've abandoned the game at large, even though you technically have.
Gun, however, wants to be an action movie. Missions will end on a cliffhanger point because it is rightly exciting to do so. But then you're returned to that open gameplay with total freedom to ignore the crisis at hand and go screw around for hours on end. They copied GTA's moves without fully understanding how to properly play them. Whereas Red Dead Revolver plays straight action, sending you from one level to the next in a more traditional video gamey fashion. There's only a few times in RDR when you're allowed meander time, and that's when it makes sense in the storyline for you to do so (and you never get free reign to explore as you do in Gun.)
It was a mistake. Gun screwed this up big time by trying to meld You-Choose-It gameplay with a strict linear storyline. The end result isn't the action feast they promised, but a slow plotless burn that services nobody adequately. If you're going to allow the gamer to wander (which is a perfectly wonderful decision), you need to develop your game around that concept instead of shoehorning another style (linear action drama, in this case) into it.
I liked being able to explore the world of Gun. In an amazing turn, the vast majority of the game takes place in the daytime, so it's very bright and happy... unlike so many games that drench the scenes in darkness just to hide crappy textures and bad stitching. It's reasonably packed with eye candy (the dust and lighting effects during a gallop are amazing!) and there are plenty of scattered mission spawn points and secret collectibles. I just lost any sort of urgency on the Must Stop Bad Guy X plot because of that freedom.
Then there's the controls, which do not help at all. Now, I'm playing the GameCube version here, which usually comes up about two buttons short when games are ported around the dial. So maybe that has everything to do with why the control scheme is so awful.
You can only holster your pistols, for example. The "put gun away" button doubles as a scope zoom on rifles. So if you're on a rifle, you have to switch to the pistol before you can drop your weapon out of some innocent sodbuster's face.
Another example: Making your horse go faster is the same button as crouching when you're not on a horse. That's just stupid... making one button hold contextually sensitive opposing concepts like that. Fast AND slow. Maybe the button mapping makes more sense on the PS2, I don't know. On the Cube, it's miserable. I'm not sure the game is worth the trouble caused by consistently confusing controls.
There are lots of dashed-off elements that break the experience, signs of a rushed and/or troubled dev process. If you park your horse on an incline and dismount, the horse will sometimes snap from standing diagonally to straight horizontal. Often when a mission ends, your horse simply vanishes, leaving you stranded. There is exactly one animation for "person gestures while talking to you" and it is embarrassingly bush and continually repeated.
So what goes right? There is a decent amount of fun here, once you've given up on the mutilated plot and mastered the controls as well as possible. Horseriding across the map is a hoot. Combat is weighed so heavily in your favor (as long as you have minimal cover) that you can afford some daring stand-offs. The voice work is great, featuring celebrity turns by Lance Hendrickson, Thomas Jane and Brad Dourif. The map (truncated though it is) covers a wide array of impressive looking regions and climates, from woodsy mountains to dusty desert.
And of course, we can't have an action game ship in 2005 without including bullet time. In Gun, the ubiquitous mode shows up as Colt's heightened reflexes and senses, slowing down time and allowing for quick, dead-on targeting. With a strong weapon, you can clear out an entire street with your Quick Draw.
There's enough tasty Western flavor to make me wish the game had done so much more with it. Gun needed another half a year in cleanup, instead of being shoved out the down for Christmas '05. Maybe then they would have figured out the pacing issues and tamed the silly glitches.
