GUN Showdown Review
Played on:
PSP
If you're just dying to play a western-themed action game on the PSP, then you probably don't even need to read this review - just go buy GUN Showdown, Activision's enhanced port of last year's hit. It's got some good action and plenty of western style, and the story and voice acting are excellent. Unfortunately, like most action ports that make it to the PSP, control issues really hold back GUN Showdown.
GUN was developed by Neversoft, the company who previously had spent their past six years making Tony Hawk games. It was a big change in development for them, as this game depicts a mostly lawless west where an old Civil War officer is looking for a lost city made of gold. You play as Colton White, a young guy who has been trapping game and making a bit of money with his father Ned (voiced masterfully by Kris Kristofferson). When Ned gets caught up in some strange plot, the riverboat he and Colton are on is attacked and Ned tells Colton - just before he dies - that he's not really Colton's father.
But all that was part of a tutorial. Colton's adventure really starts out as he wakes up on the shore days later. He's got to get to Dodge City to see a whore named Jenny, and the story starts to really pan out. He'll be visiting a couple of cities and a fairly large area of the game world, do side missions, and eventually will get caught up in the same plot that Ned did.
The PSP version of GUN by developer Rebellion makes several changes to last year's version, and most of these changes are actually pretty good. Now, Colton has a horse that won't die on him, which previously would force the player to walk back to a town or find another horse to "horsejack" (yes, originally GUN was billed as a Grand Theft Auto-in-the-west kind of game). Instead, you'll always have the same horse, and if you get him injured too badly, he'll kick you off and run away for a while - then you can call him back when he's healed up a bit. This takes away from the GTA feeling which probably wasn't necessary in the first place, and it ensures that you won't get stuck way out in the boonies without transportation. It's a good move overall, although the whole idea of having your own horse just doesn't work nearly well in this game as it did in last year's Shadow of the Colossus.
The main draw of GUN is the many gunfights you'll get into, often with multiple opponents at once. The original versions of the game used dual analog sticks and controlled fairly well, but the PSP's controls simply don't work for me. By default, the analog nub controls your movement while the four face buttons control your aim and the right trigger fires. But four buttons is not a good substitute for an analog stick when you're trying to aim, so they also allowed you to switch them - the buttons move you while the stick aims. This would make a lot more sense, but it also means reversing your controls to a "southpaw" style and getting used to them to be able to play. Unfortunately, I was unable to get used to either control method and found myself dying repeatedly in fights that would have been easy with a pair of analog sticks. The game only offers any real auto-aim when you're in Quickdraw mode, which you can use to go into slow motion and can flick the analog stick to quickly target and kill opponents. But since your Quickdraw meter is fueled by getting multiple kills quickly or head or hand shots (to knock the gun out of your opponent's hands), I found that the game's terrible aiming also led to having less Quickdraw to work with as well.
Even with the difficulty reduction that Rebellion put into GUN Showdown on the PSP, the controls still make the game much harder. And since there aren't a lot of buttons left on the PSP after dealing with movement, you've got to hold directions on the D-pad and sometimes press a button simultaneously to do all the stuff that the console versions include. While this part isn't nearly as frustrating as the infuriatingly bad aiming (which is as much Sony's fault as it is the developers of GUN Showdown - how hard would it have been to include a second analog nub on the right side of the PSP?), it just adds to the aggravation that little bit more.
The PSP version of the game also has had to tone down texture quality and overall visuals to fit the game into the PSP package. Fortunately, the world is just as big as I remember it, but now it's much more devoid of detail and feels a bit more lifeless. It doesn't help that the original game only actually included two towns, and while GUN Showdown is not an ugly game by PSP standards, it still seems to me like this game could have been much better, and more well suited to the PSP platform, if they had redesigned both the world and the controls to better play to the strengths of Sony's handheld.
Rebellion has enhanced this port in a fairly big way with the addition of new story missions and new gameplay modes. The new story missions were done by Neversoft but didn't make it into the original version, and so they fit in with the rest of the story pretty well. The other addition is the new Showdown quick-play modes that let you play some new, smaller levels against AI opponents or with wireless ad-hoc multiplayer against other people. The AI-controlled opponents are good in the action-based modes, but the included Texas Hold'Em Poker mode's AI wound up playing that pretty poorly. But I applaud the guys at Rebellion for getting a whole new full-featured mode going that works alone or with others - sadly, the action-based modes also still have the same control issues as the original game.
GUN Showdown is a great game that just doesn't quite fit onto the tiny PSP platform. The controls are intensely frustrating to get used to, and while the great story of the original game plus the new modes are a good reason to pick this one up, your enjoyment of this game is still mostly based on how much trouble you have moving and aiming. It's an admirable port of a great game with plenty of new stuff to do, but unless you're willing to get over the control hump, then you probably want to pass and just pick up the PS2, Xbox, or Xbox 360 version instead and play it at home.
