Gun [PC]

"Greed, lust, violence, that truly was the Wild West."

These are the rough, hallowed words of one wide-eyed Joel Jewett, president of Neversoft and resident displaced cowboy, in his description of Neversoft's new baby, Gun. After six years of straight Tony Hawk games, punk music, and 720s, Neversoft finally has something else to say, and the Southern California developer is going at it with all guns blazing in the gory, savage, and lawless Wild West.

A Western shooter mixing first- and third-person viewpoints, this simplistically entitled game is far from a simple shooter in chaps and a holster. The early demo we witnessed in San Francisco last month is a bloody and gruesome action-adventure title, in which Neversoft is intent on capturing the wild nature of the American West in the late 19th Century.

This original story follows the life of Colton White, reared as a mountain man in Montana close to the headwaters of Missouri. He accompanies his father, Ned White, to a steamboat to meet a friend, and quickly after, all hell breaks loose. Onboard a fight breaks out; a preacher kills your dad's friend; your dad gives you a special mysterious medallion; and before the boat explodes he throws you over and says, "I'm not your father." What a way to start a game. At least we can't accuse Neversoft of stealing from Lucas's The Empire Strikes Back ("You're not my father! NOoOoOoOoO!!!!")

Taking the medallion and heading to Dodge City, you meet a whore named Jenny and the game pretty much explodes into a massive gun fight ASAP. At least the demo we saw did. In it, we witnessed Colton using cover, peeking, rolling out, shooting, getting into a groove with Quick Draw mode (which we'll get to in a bit), and even hurling sticks of dynamite. The simple man-on-man fight that Colton starts erupts into a massive bar fight upstairs and downstairs with at least 30 characters on screen -- punching, shooting, and whaling away at each other. Tables break, glass is shattered, people fly across the tavern, and the blood, gibs, and physicality of it all is intense, colorful, and gruesome.

Neversoft is not shying away from gore. This is exemplified by the team's own homemade physics system, which illuminates how a man is blown 5-10 feet off his horse with by your booming shotgun blast. Or, when you shoot an arrow into a man's neck, you forget to tell him a dynamite stick is strung to it. Ka-freakin' BOOM. (This idea, Jewett says, comes courtesy of the Black Arrow Tribe, which originated the concept somewhere around 1883.) Or when you brandish a tomahawk in close-up hand-to-hand fighting, and butcher your enemy to death, scalping him to finish the deed. You can even collect scalps, if you wish, just to prove the game's violent nature. Yesireebob, Neversoft wants to portray the viciousness, the physical nature, and the wild culmination of a country comprising vast cultural, philosophical, and political differences being strewn together through force, violence, and a strange sense of law and order.

Unlike Red Dead Revolver, the only likeable Western Shooter of recent memory, Gun is a free-roaming, open-design affair. Which means that once you, Colton, appear in town, you're able to freely explore. There are plenty of straight-forward story missions to follow, but the side missions appear to be the most enticing. Side-missions enable you to build character points (horse, health, gun handling, quickdraw, and melee), which become useful in all aspects of the game.

In the side-missions you'll clear out opium dens, hunt wolves, bears, cougars, bison, coyotes, and rams, help a sheriff defend a stagecoach, panhandle for gold, defend horses from rustlers, set up ambushes, gamble, or even ride a train or a canoe to develop skills. You'll have the freedom to engage in them at any time, perhaps first pursing the storyline and then returning to them for fun and self-improvement.