Anyone remember this game? Gunman Chronicles actually started as a mod for the original Half-Life, which became a full conversion mod, which then went on to be a Sierra-approved full retail release. It seemed to go largely unnoticed even in the time when Half-Life was hot shit. Hell, it never even got a console port!
I suppose this probably has something to do with the developers immediately disbanding after their first and only game release. Gunman Chronicles has since become full-on abandonware. There’s no way to buy it first-hand legitimately. It’s a bit odd that it’s not even on Steam considering Sierra/Valve being involved in the original release.
It didn’t help that it didn’t receive glowing reviews at the time, but I don’t really see why. It doesn’t quite reach the high bar Half-Life set for production quality, but it’s still a very solid little shooter even after all these years.
You fight robots, aliens, a rogue AI, and even dinosaurs, and you do it with an interesting set of modifiable weapons. You can change your energy pistol to settings like rapid fire or pulse mode and even pick up a kit that can convert it into a sniper rifle later. You can also adjust the spread and shot count of your shotgun, adjust your rockets to be homing projectiles or proximity bombs or cluster bombs, and many other options.
Really the only downsides are some minor technical issues with modern systems like the fact that even though the control config in the game recognized, and even already had them set as the default, that my mouse wheel was to be used to switch weapons and weapon modes, I guess my mouse is too new? Because once in the game it couldn’t recognize the mouse wheel being used at all so I had to set those buttons to the keyboard, making weapon/mode switching a little awkward. Oh well.
So there you have it. If you like Half-Life and cool 90’s/early 2000’s FPS games that are light on story, but bursting with explosive carnage, you might want to check this one out some time…if you can find a copy of it (just Google it and download it, I won’t tell)!
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