There’s a new game in town, folks, and it’s called Gold Gun. Developed by My True Sound, it is an episodic adventure set to take place over the course of 7 episodes where you are a blind agent fighting the forces of evil inside a virtual simulation of the deep web. The first episode has been released for free to everyone, and it sounded intriguing to me, so I took some time to play it. Here are my thoughts, just for you.

Firstly, what Gold Gun is attempting to achieve here is awesome. You can tell thought has been put into making the game a fast-paced, flowing cinematic experience. Quick tilts to change direction while you’re running, and simple 2 finger taps to grab things on the run, or even to grab enemies, demonstrate the game’s intent. This is a positive thing, and I applaud the overall direction here. Unfortunately, I must sadly confess that there are a lot of negatives which I must address.

The first thing, the one that jumps right out at you, is the voice acting. Every single performance, without exception, sounds bored, and some sound completely emotionless. Any gravitas a scene should have is utterly ruined by these lackluster efforts. I understand that budget can be an issue with small developers, I really do, but if your intent is to make a cinematic experience for us to become immersed in, you need to, at the very least, improve the voice direction if not hire completely different actors. The acting is so off in some areas that I have trouble even telling what’s supposed to be going on, since no actor conveys the emotion they are supposed to convey. Tooting my own horn here a bit, but as someone with a professional video game voice acting credit, I believe I could help out here immensely, even with just my input if not my voice. No matter what, this needs to improve if people are going to be expected to buy future episodes.

Secondly, there are moments that shatter the cinematic flow I spoke of earlier. Moments where you’re following a colleague make your blind protagonist seem silly, as you stop on a dime whenever there’s a turn, and for some reason, wait for your colleague to walk several steps, sometimes 9 or 10, down the corridor, before you can even take a turn action. This is ludicrous. We blind people don’t simply stop and wait when someone we’re following starts turning. We track them, and turn right along with them. This could be handled so much better by simply starting to shift their voice and footstep sounds in a new direction as they keep conversating, and expecting us to follow the sound by tilting in that direction. It’s what we do already, and would be much more realistic.

The game is also afflicted with many immersion-breaking audio issues. When you shoot an enemy, you don’t actually know if your shot connected, as they offer no reaction whatsoever. Certain environmental audio loops have empty silence at the end, meaning you get repeated moments of about a third of a second of silence every time the sound loops. Basically there’s environmental audio, then there isn’t for a second, and then there is again. It’s incredibly jarring. The 3D audio engine seems to take a second to shift the voices of the characters as well, as often times they’ll start in the center, then snap to where they’re supposed to be. Furthermore, every character, even the ones you’re supposedly following, sounds like they’re behind you. In short, a lot of audio problems.

I want to stress again that not everything about this experience was negative. I genuinely do like the concept of the game, and I do like the way it controls. However, my ultimate conclusion is not a good one. Here it is. This build of the game should not be offered as its first episode, free or otherwise. This should be considered a concept demo, and the actual first episode should be released later, keeping the core concepts and characters, but making dramatic improvements to writing, voice acting, and audio in general. The potential for a grand cinematic story is there, but this, in its current form, is not that. Please feel free to comment and discuss if you like, and thanks for reading. As always, continue to be awesome!