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Gunman Chronicles is a retail mod created by the now defunct. And a mapper (Jeff Lane) by Valve Software to help complete the project. Gunman Chronicles is a futuristic first-person shooter computer game using the Half-Life game engine. It was originally planned as a total conversion for Quake; it then switched games to Quake II, followed by another switch to Half-Life, before being spotted by Valve.
What started out as a total conversion for Half-Life quickly burgeoned into a full-blown retail game:. While it was developed by a group calling themselves Rewolf Studios, they hardly fit the mold of the traditional development house. Hailing from all reaches of the world, many of the collaborators on have never met each other in real-life, instead sharing ideas and code over the Internet. Their project caught the attention of Sierra, who decided that the aging Half-Life engine was worth wringing for few more bucks. But while Rewolf's Gunman Chronicles would be considered brilliant as a free downloadable total conversion, it doesn't hold-up against other first-person shooters in the retail market.You play as Major Archer, part of a futuristic colonial frontier force known as the Gunmen - think Rory Calhoun and Robert E.
Lee out on the town with the guys from Starship Troopers. On a mission to explore Banzure Prime, your team of tough, hearty, fearless, Gunmen encountered a bunch of genetically enhanced Xenomes and turned into little girlie men, high-tailing out of there and leaving their general to rot in the belly of a gigantic silicon worm that can't even digest human flesh.
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You begin the game responding to a distress signal near Banzure Prime.and just guess who's back and pissed off at a certain Gunman crew?In your romp around the galaxy tracking down General Hissy-Fit, you'll explore four diverse planets, but you might as well be running down a long hallway, blasting creatures the whole way. Level design is completely linear, and there's nothing especially tricky or difficult about the puzzles to slow you down along the way. As you make your way through each level, you feel that you're just going through the paces, filling Xenomes, dinosaurs, and mechanical drones full of lead while pushing a shiny red button here and jumping over the occasional plasma leak there. It's all pretty routine, and it gets old really quickly. While it's good for some quick thrills, Gunman Chronicles doesn't have the depth of other top-notch shooters out there.
Combine this with some lacking AI that totally ignores you on occasion and you have a generic FPS that leaves you wanting more brains and profundity.The big hooks that were supposed to really draw you into Gunman Chronicles, namely customizable weapons and the promise of controllable vehicles, ultimately boil down to manipulating only a few weapon variables and piloting a single indestructible tank. While Gunman Chronicles sports a nice assortment of weapons that are neat-looking variations of the standard pistol, rifle/shotgun, machine gun, laser rifle, and rocket launcher, you can only customize features such as firing rate, number of shells fired, and missile flightpath (guided, homing, or spiral), so the promise of '32 different high-powered variations' was a little misleading. The customization is a neat twist, and the right configuration certainly comes in handy in certain situations, but the weapons - except for the chemical shooter - aren't all that different from others we've seen in all too many shooters, even with the limited tweakability.
Don't get me wrong.I like the weapon variety, it's just not all that different from any other FPS out there.Graphically, Gunman Chronicles is a step in the wrong direction. While the Half-Life engine was never a beauty queen itself, Gunman Chronicles really looks dated with its splotchy, blurry textures - especially the background textures. The game lacks character model variety as well. You'll only encounter three or four unique models on each planet, making the task of literally running from one end of the planet to another feel that much more generic.
Adding to this problem is the fact that every one of the Gunmen looks and sounds exactly the same, giving an odd cloned feel to your entire outfit when you're around other Gunmen.Audio is good in some parts and bad in others. Voices are hollow with lots of echo, even in wide-open areas with no apparent reflective surfaces. There's way too much reverb with EAX enabled, so I suggest you turn it off if you're used to playing your games with it on. Although quality sound effects accompany most of the guns, the environmental sound effects are extremely repetitive, and get annoying as the same effect drones on and on and on, especially in the metallic 'Rust' level. Sure, the constant droning of machines adds atmosphere, but can I please listen to something more than a two-second loop over and over and over and over? To make matters worse, sounds pop in at full volume instead of fading in slowly as you get closer to objects, so it's either all or nothing. I have to say that Gunman Chronicles does make good use of 3D positional surround sound, and you can really tell where things are coming from sound alone, but the mediocre sound effects will leave you wishing something sweeter was emanating from your speakers.
On the good side, the music is sparse, but when it's there, it sounds first-rate - dramatic, clear, and well recorded.What Gunman Chronicles does have is some of the best ongoing story and plot in any first person shooter to date. Following in the Half-Life tradition, Gunman Chronicles features a lot of scripted events, and uses them to their fullest effect. What Gunman Chronicles lacks in level design it almost makes up with atmosphere. This element of the game was absolutely fabulous, and I wish more established developers were as good at telling an on-going interactive story as the folks at Rewolf Studios.Gunman Chronicle's multiplayer options are right out of Half-Life, meaning the network code is pretty solid. But again, the game comes out feeling simple and plain in multiplay. There are only five maps, and the gameplay consists of deathmatch and team deatchmatch only, so unless you're a fan of your basic shoot-em-up, you're going to have to wait for the mods to start rolling in.When it comes down to it, Gunman Chronicle can best be described as a generic, run of the mill shooter. Don't get me wrong.it's a mildly entertaining game, it's just nothing special.
It makes a great total conversion, but as a full retail game selling for $30, it ultimately lacks depth and swims with the 'pitifully average' kids at the public pool on the weekends. Gunman Chronicles will have its first kiss in its junior year of high school, marry at age 27.7, and have 2.3 children, leading a reasonably satisfying yet plain and simple existence until dying at age 73.4.- Tal Blevins.
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