Recent reviews by cub

Over 20 years since the original Alien Hominid released and it is just now finding it's way to Steam.

It is basically a simple port of the original HD remaster from Xbox Live Arcade, but with just a few tweaks for modern hardware. You get higher resolution and framerate support, but the game is practically the same thing. Same fun levels, same crazy boss designs, same run and gun style gameplay, same everything. This includes the difficulty, which I won’t deny, can be pretty unfair at times. This was back in the day when enemies and bullets spawning on top of you and having extremely limited lives was common.

I had to reset at least a dozen times just to clear the game once, which isn’t even that long at 2 hours, but goes to show just how difficult a game this is. Some of the boss designs are also just outright bad, with annoying gimmicky moves or straight up bugs in some areas. I was also not a fan of the complete lack of iframes when dodge rolling and the mere split second you get when respawning. That alone led to so many deaths simply because I would spawn on top of an enemy and just die.

Still, I can’t deny there is a bit of a nostalgic feeling to it. If you grew up playing games on Newgrounds, that same energy can be found here and it is perfectly preserved for modern platforms. It may not be for everyone, but I had a good time playing through it.

I would say Alien Hominid HD is worthy of a light recommendation. It is a fun throwback to the Newgrounds days, with straightforward run and gun style gameplay complete with crazy boss designs, but also insane and often unfair difficulty. Might not be an immediate buy, but worth a look if you can catch either on sale or if you’re just a big fan of the genre.

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Over 20 years since the original Alien Hominid released and we’re getting not just a port of the HD version for modern platforms, but a full-blown sequel on top of that.

Despite this one appearing as a sequel to the original game, it plays entirely different from it. We went from a level-based side-scrolling shooter to an arcade action roguelike with an emphasis on multiplayer. It’s a drastic change, but it’s not necessarily a bad one, even if it comes with some major faults.

Instead of straightforward levels, you get missions, which are a collection of randomly generated maps that you can progress in any way you want. These maps are then full of individual levels that contain randomly generated objectives, ranging from “collect intel from downed FBI agents” to “destroy five purple enemies” and even “observe this guy eat a snack”. And that’s kinda where my first complaint lies. It feels like there are maybe 10 of these objective types total and they just keep recycling over and over on maps that don’t feel all that different from one another.

This is only held up by the gameplay, which has seen numerous improvements over the original game. Mainly, the shooting feels much better, dodging is far more responsive and actually gives you iframes, and the weapon selection is far more expansive. You get a bunch of different weapon types to use, including lasers, miniguns, energy blades, shotguns, and flamethrowers just to name some. A lot of the fun was simply finding a new weapon and trying it out. That coupled with the improved movement made for some fun gameplay.

The multiplayer focus does add a bit of chaos into the mix though. Even with just two players (the game allows up to four), we still occasionally lost where we were on screen due to the sheer insanity that the gameplay can devolve into. Bullets, enemies, and aliens flying all over. It is like 10x more chaotic than the original game which can be either a good or bad thing depending on what you’re looking for. I personally found it to be very engaging, even if it was a bit much at times.

I would say Alien Hominid Invasion is worthy of a light recommendation. It's a fun evolution on the original formula and comes with vastly improved gameplay, but does suffer from its lack of mission variety and occasionally overly chaotic combat. Might not be an immediate buy, but worth a look if you can catch either on sale or if you’re just a big fan of the genre.

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Humanity has been wiped out and now androids are working to restore it. The only problem? They don’t understand what humanity truly is.

CRYMACHINA is another one of those visual novels disguised as an action JRPG. While there is gameplay, about 75% of your time is going to be spent reading or listening through character dialogues and cutscenes. I personally don’t have a problem with this as a big VN fan, but this should be made clear upfront for those expecting a full-blown action JRPG.

The combat is real-time and mostly revolves around spamming the same few inputs as it’s effectively a two button hack and slash without any fancy combo strings. The entire game I found myself just using the same combo over and over. Light attack string, heavy attack to raise them into the air, light string, heavy attack to bring them to the ground, light string, and then a finishing move to end the combo.

That’s literally all I did for the majority of the game’s bosses. There are some where I needed to dodge more often, but most I was able to simply stun lock and repeat this combo over and over until the fight was over. It is not a difficult game by any means and there is no “hard” difficulty to set it to.

It’s weird though, because while I was able to do that to most of the bosses, when I did get hit it was usually for like half of my HP. And a lot of the bosses straight up can just one shot you. So it does hurt if any enemy actually lands a hit, it’s just that hardly ever happened in my case. The difficulty balance is just all sorts of weird here.

The core to the combat is also a bit weird. There’s a decent enough amount of feedback when I actually hit an enemy, but when I am the one being hit, it is oftentimes hard to even notice. I’ll be fighting a boss and suddenly have half of my HP and I’m like, “when did I even get hit?”.

The combat at least does good in some areas - mainly the different weapon types and the dodging and countering feels good too, it’s just brought down by how simple and monotonous it is.

The level design is just outright terrible, lazy even. The entire game is literally hallways and platforms in a cyberspace-like environment. There is virtually no exploration outside of maybe an additional hallway to a chest, there’s no complex structures, just hallways, pillars, walls, emptiness really.

It’s so bad that some levels are literally just a straight path to the boss room. You walk forward, kill a few random enemies that spawn, and keep walking forward and suddenly you’re at the boss room which is just a slightly wider hallway. It took maybe 1 minute to reach that boss room, so what exactly is the point of even having the stuff prior to it? It’s like the game is trying to maintain this illusion of substance when there really isn’t any.

The entire experience is mission-based. You enter a level, run to the boss room, kill the boss, and are sent back to this hub area - all menu-based by the way - where you get a story cutscene, mandatory character dialogue scenes, the chance to edit your loadout, and then you need to head back in to the next mission. The loop is very defined. Nothing really breaks this formula and really, it’s kinda dull as a result.

The story is really the only thing propping this game up. I’ve played other games from this developer and they can be very hit or miss, so I was a bit surprised here. We get a full-blown post-apocalyptic story that deals with the deeper meaning behind relationships and even broad topics like humanity without feeling like it was written by an edgy middle schooler like Monark was. I’m not going to make the case that it’s some super involved, multi-level story, but for JRPG standards, it’s fairly interesting.

Maybe a lot of that is due to the setting - basically a futuristic world where humanity was wiped out by a world war and androids are attempting to restore humanity, but struggle to understand what exactly being a “real human” entails. I am a bit of a sci-fi nerd, so that setup definitely pulled me in.

The real winner here though is the pacing. CRYMACHINA is faster-paced, but not too fast. There are slower moments of character building, but they come in bite-sized pieces and don’t overstay their welcome. The twists and turns of the main story are weaved in with these character building moments and it’s actually quite a good combo. The studio did a great job balancing the pacing there.

The game also isn’t too drawn out. It can be completed in just 10 hours if you’re doing just the main content. There are side missions, but the game is so easy that I didn’t even touch those until the end, there was just no need to. There are some additional, optional dialogue sequences too. Overall, you can probably squeeze maybe 20 hours if you do all of that content, maybe even 30 if you want to go the completionist route and kill all of the optional bosses and such.

That said, it’s not too replayable and I can’t see myself returning to the game in the future. Not that that matters to me personally, but I know others value that aspect so it’s important to note.

I guess the character designs are cool and the music isn’t that bad either, but the graphics, the cutscenes, and really just the overall aesthetic are not really that good, barebones even. This is obviously a low budget JRPG and it shows in pretty much every area.

I played through the entire thing at 4k max settings hovering around 144 fps on my RTX 3080 Ti. But again, I can’t say that was surprising given that this looks like something from two console generations ago. There’s a decent amount of settings to change too, so there is room to play around with if you’re on lower end hardware.

CRYMACHINA is a decent story wrapped up in some truly boring gameplay and a cheap overall aesthetic. The combat is monotonous, the difficulty simply isn’t there, and the level design is just outright awful. This is saved a good bit by the story, with its cool setting and solid pacing, but unfortunately, that is coupled with the rest of the game and it’s honestly just not worth it, at least at full price. This is a budget JRPG with a premium price tag and I would 100% recommend waiting for a significant drop in that price before giving it a look.

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Cities: Skylines 2 should not be released. It pains me to say as a big fan of the original game, but the sequel here is simply not in an acceptable state.

So basically, Paradox sent me a copy of the game - thanks to the for that by the way - and given how many hours I have poured into the original, I went into this one super excited. I booted up the game and was immediately met by a 5 fps main menu. Not 60, not 30, but just 5. I figured, okay, I’ll change some settings around to see what I can get to work. The devs sent me their recommended graphics settings, so I swapped to those and managed to get the main menu to roughly 70 fps.

This was great, until I hopped into the actual game and it wasn’t. After just an hour of gameplay, that 70 fps deteriorated all the way down to 30. After two hours, it was down to 15-20 with my population not even hitting 10,000 yet. I was playing at 1440p on a mix of mostly low and some medium settings. My system specs are above the recommended requirements, even after they were raised a few weeks ago (which was already a massive red flag to begin with).

The performance is just abysmal. I can see maybe 30 fps being fine, but the fact that the game frequently dips to half of that on almost the lowest settings is just unacceptable. It makes the experience feel slow, choppy, and frustrating. It’s not even like the game itself is bad. From what I have played, it has been a solid upgrade to what I loved about the first game. It’s just that those upgrades are marred by some of the worst performance I have seen from a PC release all year.

I’ve seen others concerned with the change of modding platforms - from Steam Workshop to Paradox’s own mod platform - but honestly, that doesn’t bother me so much. The performance is all that really matters at this point and I cannot in good faith give the game a proper review until it is optimized. That might take months. Maybe longer.

I cannot recommend Cities: Skylines 2. It’s almost unplayable in its current state and the fact that it is being released anyways is really just sad. The publisher knows the game isn’t ready and that really just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe good for business, but bad for the consumer and that is ultimately who I always will side with.

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A wizard with spells is cool, but a wizard with a gun that also uses spells might just be even cooler.

Wizard with a Gun is a sandbox roguelike shooter where you turn back time to travel to randomly generated biomes to hunt down enemies, gather crafting materials, and find all sorts of neat loot. The core game loop here is very defined. Each time you turn back time, a new timer starts, counting down until chaos invades the world you just generated. So you need to get all your gathering and hunting done in that short time, lest you be overrun by powerful creatures all resembling some sort of pink blob. Or if you are feeling lucky, you can stay through that chaos and farm those pink blobs for material to make even better items back at base.

It’s back at that base that you’ll find the bulk of the game’s crafting mechanics. There’s simple crafting you can do on the fly, but also research tables, tons of different ammunition types, armor upgrades, elemental upgrades, and a full slate of objects, walls, and flooring to build if you’re into the decoration side of things. This was one of my favorite parts of the experience, just going down these research trees and trying out new weapon combinations.

Just casually exploring usually gave me more than enough material for general crafting, it was only when I wanted something super specific that I would have to generate an entire level for it. I feel like a lot of games reliant on crafting mechanics like this fall victim to slower pacing as a result, but that is not the feeling I had here. Wizard with a Gun is fast and satisfying without sacrificing complexity.

Of course this wouldn’t work without good combat, another area the game does a great job in. Hits have feedback, there’s a good amount of variety with the weapon choices, and as mentioned previously, the sheer amount of customization possibilities make it very fun to play around with.

The game could use some improvement in the area of its level design and random generation. It’s kinda basic and lacks the unique structures, enemies, and other random events that really sell a good roguelike. As such, the actual act of exploring isn’t quite as good as it could have been, even if I still had a good time with it.

The bosses have only a few attacks, aren’t all that difficult, and really aren’t that satisfying to beat. The quest system felt like it was implemented just to give a general direction when it could have been so much more. The game has some lore, it just isn’t explored to the extent that I would have liked. It’s not outright bad, just kinda basic and disappointing in comparison to the rest of the experience.

Graphically, the game looks great. It’s not anything groundbreaking, but I liked the stylized, darker aesthetic with its heavy use of shading and outlining. This, combined with the lighting, makes for a very cool overall look, one that’s even better in motion as the animations are just as good. The music is less notable, but still fitting for the overall style the game goes for.

I had no issues playing at 4k 144fps on my 3080 Ti. There aren’t really any settings to change outside of resolution, but it’s not a difficult game to run by any means so that likely won’t pose an issue for most. Controls are also good. I spent my entire playtime using just keyboard and mouse and didn’t feel the need to change any bindings.

Wizard with a Gun is fast and satisfying without sacrificing complexity, the ideal formula for an action roguelike. It offers up some clean combat, tons of different weapon and ammo possibilities, and a crafting system that doesn’t feel intrusive or tacked on in any way. It’s a fairly solid recommendation for fans of the genre, even if it does struggle with its levels and overall quest system. Still, I had fun with it and would recommend it.

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Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a real indie treat among all the other big releases surrounding it. It is not often we get games full of soul like this!

For a game built around skating and cycling, the devs really did a great job with the movement here. It’s fluid, it’s exciting once the speed picks up, and it doesn’t take long to get the hang of - courtesy of the well-placed and helpful tutorials. Skating around, wallriding, grinding, it’s all relatively simple to pull off and the ease of movement here lends itself well to building combos.

A big part of the gameplay is building up those combos by doing tricks and getting multipliers to make that combo grow. The tricks are just a simple button press and that’s the first of my complaints here. You get your little handful of tricks and that’s literally it. There’s no special inputs here, nothing more complex than your simple kickflip or whatnot. Maybe that’s a side effect of having the movement be so easy is that the moves are as well, but I would have liked at least a little bit more complexity there.

The level design might just be my favorite part of the game. Every time I entered a new area it was like I was given this entire skater’s wishlist full of things shoved into one package. Grinding rails going everywhere, tubes to skate and slide through, half-pipes to allow me to reach higher areas - the game does an outstanding job giving you these environments to work in and it is never not fun to skate around, doing combos, finding all the graffiti spots, and there’s also a bunch of collectibles too.

I kinda miss when games had simple, yet effective level design like this. Not only do they look cool, but they’re fun to move around in and explore and I don’t know, the devs just really nailed that feeling I got playing 3D platformers back when I was a kid.

For some reason this game also has combat? And to be blunt - it’s awful. There is no impact, no sense of weight, the hitboxes are ridiculous, and just like the tricks, it mostly devolves into button mashing. That said, the combat is not a main player here. You do get occasional segments where you need to wipe out a small police squad or take down a sniper, but you hardly ever need to utilize the combat in its most basic form. The bosses usually have some clever design to them that encourage skating and graffiti and the devs actually did a pretty good in that department.

I felt like the game may have been a bit too easy. I don’t think I ever failed a single challenge, the combo multiplier on rails trivializes the crew battles, and I only died a few times against the bosses. Given the simplistic nature of the combat, the tricks, and the movement - this is likely intended and I think it might be better to view the game as some laidback dumb fun.

The story actually tackles some pretty mature themes and draws similarities to Ghost in the Shell and even Psycho-Pass in some areas. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed it. It was paced well, had nice cutscenes, and just had this energy that kinda reminded me of a Suda51 game.

I managed to complete the game in just under six hours. It’s not a long game by any means, but I wouldn’t say it was too short. For completionists, there is quite a bit more to do. I may have completed the game, but I had less than 20% of the achievements, for example.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a better soundtrack to come out this year. There’s an excellent blend of funky hip-hop, jazzy tunes, bass-heavy beats, and it’s just such a great mix of styles for the type of gameplay here. The visuals too. Not quite as noteworthy, but serviceable enough for a cel-shaded experience like this, with fun character designs and excellent use of color to bring this world to life.

I had the game crash on me once, but the rest of the experience went by without issue running at 4k 144fps on my 3080 Ti. I also played the game fine on both controller and keyboard and mouse without feeling the need to remap any buttons on either. Plays well, runs well. Just how it should be.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a real indie treat. Fun gameplay, stellar level design, an absolute bop of a soundtrack, a compelling story - the whole experience just has a lot of soul behind it even if it may falter in areas like its complexity, difficulty, and combat. I grew to like it quite a bit by the time I finished and would recommend it to those that miss the feeling of 3D platformers of old.

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I may like this series and there are some good elements, but honestly, my experience with Fate/Samurai Remnant was just painful.

I will start with the good. For one, the core combat mechanics are actually pretty good, great even. You get a handful of stances to swap between and are actually encouraged to do so depending on your HP level, how many enemies you are fighting, and what stats you want to prioritize. It adds a good bit of depth to the otherwise mashfest that is Musou-style gameplay. There is still a bit of mashing, but I liked the extra layers added here.

It is just unfortunate that this combat is stuck with some incredibly repetitive and tedious mission design. The game literally opens with you helping a guy collect debts from random people around town. That’s how bad it is.

When you are not running random errands as main story quests, you are dealing with this absolutely tedious turn-based board game style travel system. You have to travel between nodes to get to your destination and if you run into an enemy along the way, jump into a copy-paste arena to fight them in.

And the enemies are copy-paste too. You will be fighting the same type of samurai and a handful of monsters the entire game. You occasionally get some new, interesting ones, but it just becomes tiring spamming buttons against the same enemies battle after battle. Especially so given how this game manages its difficulty level: by simply raising enemy HP. Bosses especially, since they get an extra armor meter that just takes forever to break before you actually do damage. It’s not like the bosses are even hard, just boring and time-consuming.

The gameplay is only about half of the experience, maybe just 30-40% of it. The rest is visual novel style storytelling, which I honestly don’t mind as a VN fan, but not so when it is as wordy and full of fluff like it is here. For every actual cutscene, you get a full 30 minute dinner dialogue scene. One cool character reveal, and then an info dump where a character explains a simple concept to death as if I was five years old.

It’s just frustrating. Boring and frustrating. I know the Fate franchise is full of lengthy stories, but I don’t recall ever being as bored with them as I was here. The pacing is just far too slow.

I had no issues playing at 4k 120fps, although it was a bit weird that the game is divided into performance and quality modes on PC, the latter of which listed a 60fps limit. The game still looked fine in performance mode - at least, for this developer’s standard - so I can’t say I minded all that much. There are a bunch of video settings to change too, so props to the devs for that instead of just leaving it as one slider as they have definitely done in the past.

I cannot recommend Fate/Samurai Remnant. There are obviously some good ideas here, especially with the combat mechanics, but the gameplay loop, the mission design, and the story full of filler really sour the experience. The Fate/Extella games may have their issues, but they are at least better than this.

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Video review: https://youtu.be/PjrzMvfXiao
Written version below!

After the disappointment that was Rune Factory 5 (it was just... ok), I was very ready to dive back into the gameplay that made me fall in love with the series with Rune Factory 3 Special.

Note: Trimmed to fit Steam, check video for full version!

Rune Factory 3 Special is a very good fantasy themed farming sim. It comes complete with all the farming elements, but also a lively town with a full cast of characters to get to know, surrounding wilderness to explore full of enemies to take down with the game’s combat system, and a story that, honestly, I think I might like more than Rune Factory 4. It is less bloated and more straight to the point in terms of the main plot, instead letting the characters shine.

This works in the game’s favor as the characters have always been a strong point in this series and Rune Factory 3 is no exception. I had a great time getting to know each character, completing quests for them, and yeah, there is a romance system too which I cannot deny is one of the highlights of the experience.

Not everything sticks though. The combat is still janky with its hitboxes and targeting, the UI is still not that great, and the quality of life could use some improvement, but overall, it is just a fun farming sim. The farming elements are fleshed out and not super tedious, the story is laidback and matches the setting perfectly, and the upgraded visuals are nice too. Not the highest of quality upgrades, but it gives it a nostalgic look and I cannot deny I love the approach.

It runs well too. I had no issues on the performance front. It runs just fine natively at 4k and at 144fps, coming with a little launcher to allow you to edit these settings.

Rune Factory 3 Special is a pretty easy recommendation to make. It is a great port of an already great game and I am glad that we are getting more of this series on PC. Rune Factory 5 left a sour taste in my mouth, so it is nice to get back on track.

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Full review (with score): https://youtu.be/g-douiTlGcw
Written review below!

We finally have Astro's Playroom on PC. Or rather, as close as we can get. It is called Boti: Byteland Overclocked and it aims to fill that very specific 3D platforming inside a computer niche.

Note: Trimmed to fit Steam, check video for full version!

Boti is a competent 3D platformer that tackles the basics and nothing more. It’s got a bit of platforming, a bit of a puzzle touch to that platforming, and the devs really did a good job with the actual variety of the gameplay. You’ll go from one of those platforming segments, to an area with a puzzle or two, to a giant slide that reminds me of the ones from Battle for Bikini Bottom, and then there’s swinging, cannons, and even some vehicle segments.

It’s all basic stuff, but it’s spread out in such a way that the gameplay never really becomes tedious. The collectibles and bonus objectives add to this too, encouraging you to explore further and occasionally solve the extra puzzle or two.

That said, don’t expect any real challenge here. The boss fights are laughable at best, but when you take into account the target audience here, it’s hard to fault the game for that. It is very forgiving with its checkpoints too. Not a difficult game by any means.

I completed Boti in just over 3 hours, but you could probably squeeze double the time out of it if you go the completionist route. I don’t feel like it was too short either, the gameplay pacing was steady throughout and didn’t feel like it was rushing.

The story is hardly notable because of how little it matters here. It’s more so just a means to link together the different levels and felt like an afterthought if anything. Not that the game needs something more than that though.

The aesthetic, for the most part, is pretty good. It makes good use of lighting, coloring, and overall just has a nice vibrant look to it. This is while running on Unreal Engine 5, which shows in some ways - such as the ray tracing - but I cannot deny I was a bit surprised to learn that given that this could have easily passed as a last generation game. Not that that is a bad thing, just that when you look at the big picture, the backgrounds are blocky, the textures are not all that high-res, and the overall geometry is on the simpler side.

This is unfortunately not a really well-optimized game. I am running on an RTX 3080 Ti and was unable to play the game natively at 4k with ray tracing OFF without dips to well below 60 fps. I figured - okay, I will just enable dynamic image scaling to hopefully fix that. And while that did raise my fps to above 100, it was not stable and some areas and scenes still caused dips to below 60fps. Which again, is surprising to see given that the game does not have the graphical fidelity to warrant using 100% of my GPU. So while it is not the worst performance I have seen, it could definitely use a bit more optimization.

I hate to say it, but in its current state, Boti should not be released and I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone with the amount of technical issues I ran into. Whether that be audio randomly cutting out in cutscenes, cutscene dialogue just disappearing outright, character models getting stuck in the wrong direction, button prompts getting mixed up and displaying keyboard, Xbox, and PlayStation all at once, objects not loading in when they should, physics going out the window at times, and even soft locks on top of that.

Several times while playing I had to reload the level just to get the game to work correctly. And that is before I even mention the crashes - which I unfortunately also had a couple of. Keep in mind, all of the issues I mentioned here are the ones that WERE NOT already included on the “known issues” list I was provided by the devs.

The game even acknowledges its own lack of polish in a way. There is straight-up an “unstuck” button on the pause menu that you can press to move your character out of terrain when they get stuck. I unfortunately had to make heavy use of this button, especially when playing online co-op. And that co-op is a separate issue entirely. My boyfriend and I managed to get through the first level playing online co-op, but I had to play through the rest of the game by myself because we just kept running into issues, including this weird flickering when standing on certain objects and some areas where the game progresses for one player, but traps the other - forcing a reload.

Note: The devs have informed me that these bugs are being fixed

Boti is far too buggy to be worth a play in its current state. Numerous soft locks, collision issues, broken co-op, and even crashes prevent the otherwise competent gameplay from being anything more than that. Maybe in the future it will be worth a look, but as of now, I cannot recommend it.

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Take an umbrella and slap a gun on it and you get a pretty fun little fast-paced indie side scroller.

Gunbrella is a side scroller that emphasizes fast combat and fluid movement. Most enemies die in one or two shots and this leads to some faster paced gameplay, only helped by how quick the movement is here. Your gunbrella allows you to slide, jump, hover, and otherwise dash around very quickly and it makes for some really fun gameplay. It is never not satisfying to enter a room and dispatch all of the enemies while flying through the air and exiting without even touching the ground. The devs really did a good job making the movement fun and intuitive to use.

The combat is also quite fun, but not without its issues. Your gunbrella can make use of multiple ammo types, but I found the other ammo types so scarce that I only ever ended up using them for bosses and that just felt like wasted potential. The game could use more of those enemies too. It got a bit old fighting the same types over and over and while new ones were occasionally introduced, they lacked the variety to really get rid of that monotony.

That and the game has a bad habit of sticking these enemies with the simplest of attack patterns. Which unfortunately also extends to the bosses - probably the most hit or miss element of the entire experience. You get some really cool ones that have a bunch of cool moves and then other ones that seem like they should be this big and difficult thing, but end up having just a single move that they repeat the entire fight. Very disappointing there.

The level design is cool and leaves room for secrets and even full blown sidequests, the game world is incredibly detailed and I really liked the grungy pixel art aesthetic, the music has some standout tracks and matches that aesthetic, and the story actually is not that bad. I did not go into this game expecting the story to be such a large element, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a somewhat well thought out plot complete with characters that are genuinely interesting to talk to, dark humor that matches the setting, and even the ability to make decisions throughout the story that change certain outcomes. It is not something super complex, but it is engaging enough.

It took me just under five hours to complete the game and that is with doing some side quests along the way. The experience is rather linear and I cannot say that it is really that replayable as a result. That said, there are some sizeable side quests to clear if you are looking to squeeze additional time out of it, along with some achievements that could possibly require a second playthrough.

A bit disappointing that it appears to be locked to 60 fps, but otherwise, I had no issues with performance and no bugs to speak of. It is a very polished experience and plays well on both controller and keyboard and mouse.

Gunbrella is fast, fun, and violent - mixing a dark and grungy aesthetic with some very fluid and satisfying gameplay. It may be lacking in some areas - namely enemy variety, the boss fights, and the ammo types, but the rest of the experience makes up for it. I enjoyed my time with it and it’s a great way to kill five hours or so.

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