Last year’s GUN billed itself as being this huge, sweeping, wide-open Wild West adventure that would allow us to relive our childhood memories of playing cowboys and Indians, but it really didn’t live up to it’s promises. Instead, we were given a very acceptable game by most standards, but one that was made worse by the promises and hype behind it. It seemed like GUN was doomed to bargain bins, but Activision decided to give the franchise one last frontier to explore – the PSP. Sadly, this is just a straight port of last year’s game, only with a few less buttons to control it with.

GUN stars a young cowboy named Colton. He makes his living hunting game with his father, Ned, to supply ships and towns with fresh meat. The game opens with a brief tutorial that introduces you to some of the game’s shooting mechanics, which is pretty helpful at introducing you to the mechanics. But, much like the rest of the game, it progresses quickly and in a few moments, Colton is fighting for his life and his father is dead. This sets off a chain of events that, like a train without breaks, can’t be stopped. Colton will soon find himself battling against the law, for the law, against the Indians, for the Indians, against friends, and for enemies.

These battles take place in towns and in the plains, but while these areas are supposed to feel vast and open, they feel constricted and small and can easily be traversed and fully explored in just a handful of minutes. With only a few real areas to explore and few hidden areas, there’s no real sense of exploration and discovery and you’re simply left riding as quickly as possible to get on to the next part of the story.

As Colton, you’ll spend your days (or day, this is a short game) trying to avenge the death of your father. Along the way, you’ll hear a tale of a lost city of gold that helps the plot develop. But the game remains far too short, as I previously mentioned. To complete the storyline, you’re going to have to master riding horses and be able to handle intense shoot-outs. Also not included are solid controls. The port over to the handheld has made GUN difficult to control, which is a shame because the console versions handled beautifully. Movement is assigned to the analog stick, camera control to the face buttons, and actions to the D-Pad, with the action changing depending on the length of time the button is held down. This is awfully cumbersome, especially in the heat of battle. The lost of the second analog stick is one problem that GUN for the PSP can’t overcome.

There are a large variety of side quests to complete that boost up your abilities and really makes the game a lot easier. If you want, you can ride packages to people through the Pony Express, or if you want to do something a little more violent you can collect bounties on people. You can also participate in poker tournaments at the saloon. Try as I might, I could never win a tournament. Hell, you can even mine gold. These side missions aren’t really necessary, but you can use the money you earn from them to buy weapons upgrades, plus they add some length to this otherwise short experience. The PSP version of this game offers a few more side missions to complete that add a little bit of time to this otherwise short game.

GUN bills itself as a free-roaming western action-adventure game where the player is free to choose who he sides with, free to travel the land, and free to live the dream of being a cowboy. If you want to be lawless, you can go right into a town and blast as many people as you want. Of course, the town’s men aren’t going to be too pleased with this development and they’ll try to kick you out, but for the most part this is inconsequential. You can take a shotgun and blast a woman about fifteen feet down the road; complete with a blood smear along the ground (this is pretty satisfying).

The main problem with this system is that there aren’t any consequences for your actions. You can shoot at everyone in the town, but there’s no penalty for it. Prices in the town don’t go up and people will still deal with you afterward. There’s no penalty for misbehavior. Maybe that was an intention of the developers to make the West seem lawless. Maybe because people are afraid of you, they don’t challenge you. Personally, I think that the feature just wasn’t that well-thought out. It would have been nice to see some sort of meter or something that considered the opinion the few towns that make up the game had for you. This is not included.

But while the controls have been mangled in the port, the graphics and sound have held up almost perfectly. The draw distance is still impressive and the characters look decent, though their fast movements do seem to cause a bit of blurring on the PSP’s screen. The sound has transferred over completely intact with no real loss in quality, which is important because GUN’s voice acting, led by Thomas Jane (The Punisher) as Colton, was one of its best features.

But here’s the question: should you buy GUN for the PSP. If you haven’t played it, this isn’t all that bad. The controls are a bit fuggly, but all in all, it’s the same game that was released for the major consoles, so if you’re really dying to play this, this is a version to consider. Almost everything is preserved. It just isn’t the wide-open, sprawling adventure that the advertisements want you to believe it is. It’s a fun game centered on the myths of the Old West, but unfortunately, GUN just can’t really capture that magic completely.