Gunman Chronicles Review

Er, khm...

And speaking of Gunman's unique features - how 'bout the possibility of customizing your weapon in numerous different ways, thus ending up with many different destructive combos? Yeah, every weapon has various modes of use... For example, you can customize the living hell out of your M.U.L.E. by selecting if the rockets should detonate in proximity, or on impact; if the payload should be explosive or cluster, or should the rockets be fired in a spiral or conventionally.

You can load your shotgun with one to four buckshot, even switch between the shotgun and riotgun modes. Your blaster gun (or whatever the heck it's called) can be customized into a mean sniper.

One other example is the "Polaris Blade." -- an electrical weapon that seems somewhat tame at first, but reveals itself as being a bit more lethal once properly configured. Some settings create a powerful lighting stream that crawls along walls and really brightens up the room as it moves from monster to monster. Another setting creates extremely powerful single bursts of lightning. And, these can be mixed and matched, of course. I don't feel like giving away much more info on the weapons, but I will tell you this...I couldn't bind my mouse wheel as the weapon/mode switch key. Need I add that I was extremely frustrated, because there is no time during a heavy firefight to go: ooh... what does this button do? Oooh...my name is Homer Simpson and I work at a nuclear power plant full of little buttons. A rig specific bug, or not? I tried to bind the wheel unsuccessfully both at home (T-bird GeForce 2), and at work (PIII GeForce). I was able to switch between weapons with my mouse wheel by default, but after some messing around with the controls it just stopped switching both the weapons and firing modes.

Luckily, there is a utility called Gunman Weapons Assistant, which lets you create and use different weapon aliases with your favorite predefined weapon setups on the fly. Neat...but there's no trace of the little utility on the retail CD. The weapons' balancing is OK (the assault rifle although fast-firing is inaccurate and overheats a lot, and so does the Polaris Blade). However, I did tend to favor the use of a sniper/shotgun combo -- using sniper in the outdoor chapters, like the West (you can decapitate a guy with a sniper head shot), and the shotgun in most indoor/close quarter environments.

And a couple of final notes: the enemy AI (i.e. the rebel soldiers, not the damn brainless critters), lack the famous tactical work and coop. style of the Half Life soldiers and generally didn't present too much of a threat. They'll roll and strafe, but all that looks silly, and they don't use the cover properly. Sound effects are rather authentic, but they still suffer from some distortion and awkward echoes present ever since Half Life came out in '98.

Depending on what you're looking for in a FPS, Gunman may either disappoint you or provide you with some fun, but shallow and clichéd gameplay. It sure as hell ain't NOLF, but then again it didn't have anywhere near the resources of some of the FPS retail best sellers. If we take it for what it really is - a mod, then one could label Rewolf's baby as a nice mod success story with mediocre retail reach and appeal.