Gun

For $9 on Steam, how could I not buy this one? A cowboy game with open-world features and decent gunplay. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. Not enough to make this a "bad" game by any means, it's very fun, but some issues do get frustrating.

The first issue is the frequent loading. Now, this is an open world so naturally it's going to need to load different areas somehow. The way that it's implemented, however, is rather awkward. While you're traveling, the game will just suddenly freeze for a second or two while it loads the next part. It often happens at inopportune times, there's no real predicting it, and it interrupts the flow of gameplay. This wouldn't be such a huge problem if it wasn't so frequent. While traveling through a large canyon, for instance, even though there's absolutely nothing inside the canyon of interest, it will load for a few seconds upon entering the canyon, then load again as you leave the canyon to go to the next area. So you enter, it loads, you ride through for maybe 7-10 seconds, then it loads again as you leave. The loading was never this frequent in GTA, which rendered sprawling cities with only a load between different large areas separated by bridges. Gun would be like if GTA loaded after every 5 blocks of street travel. This won't happen in combat-heavy sections of the game, so its impact of the gameplay is mostly negligible, but it's still annoying.

The second major issue is the hitboxes and general aiming. This is a console port, unfortunately, so this means that if you aim at someone your crosshair will start automatically tracking that enemy until he's dead. If you aim a little to the side of the enemy, it will still hit him because of how big the hitbox is. This doesn't make the game unplayable, but it's annoying for sure. It also makes headshots seem a little random, because your reticle is usually rather large. The best you can hope for is to center their head in the big box of your crosshair and hope for the best. Sometimes it blows their head off (literally, it's cool looking) or sometimes it just hits their chest.

Ok, with that out of the way, I do like this game. The protagonist is a bad-ass, the storyline is actually decent (if cliche) and the open-world mechanics work well in a wild west setting. I wish there was a little more going on in the world to interact with, since usually you're just traveling through empty canyons and plains or else in a dusty towns with people just walking around. Occasionally you'll see a saloon shootout or something but they don't affect you much. The game is a lot more linear than the GTA series, in fact. Most of the time, you'll just want to get to the next scripted story mission, which are the real focus of the game and handled well in general.

I wish the control problems and loading interruptions weren't there, but even so this is a good game. I doubt I'd have bought it for more than $20 or so, but for $9 it's a good deal.