Gun Showdown first look

Rogue isn't the only addition to the game's story mode, either. Colton will now be able to toss around throwing knives and landmines, and five entirely new missions have been plugged into the narrative to pad out the length.

We got to see one of these unfold, with Colton told to hunt and kill a guy named Kragen to impress Hoodoo Brown, the evil mayor of Empire. The setup seemed a little bare-bones, with a single henchman explaining the task before sending Colton off. But the mission itself was interesting, with Colton tracking down Kragen's gang in a remote mountain outpost and blasting them out of a wooden tower.

If you're looking for something a little less involved than a rehashing of Gun's storyline, Showdown will also feature seven "quickplay" modes that'll let you jump straight into the action. We've seen six so far, including Quail Hunt and Bear Hunt, which are self-explanatory; Texas Hold 'Em is a quick variation of the single-player Poker games; Fire Fight, where the object is apparently to burn buildings with Molotov cocktails; and Hollister's Dynamite Run, which pits you against the crazed, explosive-toting rogue colonel from the story mode. (To get a glimpse at a few of these, just hit the Movies tab above.)

We also got to see Suppress the Outlaws, in which the town of Empire is besieged by an unending stream of bad guys, and your job is to kill or arrest as many of them as possible within the time limit. Killing is easy enough, but arrests are a little tricky - you'll have to actually grab the guy and drag him to a waiting marshal, all while under a hail of bullets from his "friends." Hold the Fort mode was also pretty cool, with players manning cannons to keep enemies from breaching a frontier fortress.

Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.