Game Reviews

Gunslugs 2

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Gunslugs 2
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| Gunslugs 2

Gunslugs 2 is a chaotic shooter with a bright arcade heart that overflows with rich and breezy violence. It follows a pattern, but that pattern features numerous large explosions and a body count that reaches the millions.

It's gorgeous too, all chunky sprites and massive bosses that spew fire and spray out showers of glorious rockets.

Smooth controls and a generous helping of power-ups and extra characters make the game easy to pick-up and easy to get addicted to as well.

But those crazed flourishes of violence, square spurts of blood, and piles of cute slaughtered soldiers might be a little too overwhelming for anyone looking for a more traditional blaster.

Acts of violence

The game casts you as a lone hero, wandering through a series of randomly generated, enemy filled levels. There are jungles, trains, and all manner of other areas to explore and shoot to hell.

Your objective is destroying a series of towers that are scattered throughout the levels. You pop inside, kill everything that moves, avoid some obstacles, then jump on a TNT plunger to blow everything up.

Obviously you parachute to safety, and wander in through you're seemingly never-ending orgy of righteous carnage and machine gun fuelled retribution.

The towers also act as checkpoints of sorts. Rather than saving your progress, they give you a new character to play as. This fills up your health and gives you a new super weapon to play with for a bit.

Explosion pun

You can pick up new guns as you play, from high powered flame throwers to rocket launchers. There are turrets you can hop in to rain death on your enemies, and walkers you can control to give you a boost.

Shops sell single items, from armour to adrenaline boosts and ammo packs. You spend the coins that you earn from killing, and they stack across characters as well. Swap to a new hero when you're dressed as Robocop and they'll don the armour too.

The simple controls let you move left and right, jump, and shoot everything that moves. Context sensitive buttons let you hop into towers, shops, and vehicles with a quick tap.

Get to the helicopter

Gunslugs 2 is just the right side of bonkers. It's violent in a strangely charming way, bright and silly and full of cheeky pop culture nods that'll bring a smile to your face.

There are a few niggles here and there. The boss battles aren't quite as sharp as they could be, and the find-a-tower, get-to-the-chopper beat of the gameplay can get a little repetitive over long play sessions.

But if you're looking for a quick-fire arcade shooter that offers a pretty sizeable challenge and isn't afraid to layer shooty madness on top of more shooty madness, you're in for a treat.

This is an engaging, easy to pick up chunk of cartoon violence that clicks in all the right ways.

It might not be the most original game out there, but when you're parachuting away from a colossal explosion, wearing a Batman costume and firing rockets into the midst of a horde of enemies, you won't really care.

Gunslugs 2

A sharp and well put together shooter, Gunslugs 2 might be a little too crazy for some, but it's definitely worth a look
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.