Enter the Gungeon: Gun Pun Fun
19 May 2016
Dark Souls is an amazing game series that so many people have weighed their opinion about it that it doesn’t need one more tongue bath. Not to mention that Dark Souls is one of my favorite game series so the bias would be through the roof. So today we are going to be looking at possibly one of the stupidest titled games that isn’t trying to be ironic. Enter the Gungeon is a game that many people have called The Binding of Isaac with guns. Before, that title that laid with Nuclear Throne, so what made everyone flock over from Nuclear Throne to Gungeon?
Enter the Gungeon, to exhaust all the buzzwords possible, is a rouge-like, bullet hell, and dungeon crawler. If this came could only have one of these words to its name, it would be Bullet Hell. This game is bullet hell like no other game you have seen. This games level one is more bullet hell than most games half way point. Now normally this would be a deal breaker for most people, and this would be a deal breaker for me as well, but the game is able to circumvent that by adding in a dodge roll mechanic. This mechanic allows you to roll through bullets while having i-frames for half of the animation of the roll. Adding in this dodge roll allows a certain level of skill to be added into the game to allow players to deal with the bullet hell bullshit. That doesn’t mean this game suddenly turned easy, oh no, it’s still pretty damn hard. Yet the game is the type of hard that you always felt like it’s your fault when you died.
While the game is a type of hard that is rewarding of good play, it can’t avoid the curse of rouge-like games. That curse is when a run in a rouge-like is dictated by luck. Gungeon has this problem in the form of getting shitty guns, and thus not being able to kill things before they kill you. While I admit Im not the best player, it is kind of depressing to think that your run is determined within the first floor if you aren’t extremely skilled at the game. Yet even with this in the way I still find myself playing the game, wanting to git gud.
One of the why I find myself coming back to this game is a real sense of progression. Even if I die on the first or second floor I always feel that there is more for the game to offer no matter how many times I die to the first floor boss. After a couple of hours put into this game I feel that I am getting better and better while also unlocking secrets, new guns, and watching the hub world grow. Even when you “beat” the game it still offers you different ways to play to make runs more interesting. This game does really feel like the rouge-like that can compete with the Binding of Isaac in terms of longevity and staying power.
The game, in my opinion, still has some issues. The configuration menus in this game are something to be desired. If your game launches on the correct screen consider yourself lucky as fixing this issue took me about 5 minutes to get it to appear on the correct screen, with the correct resolution, and being borderless fullscreen. If you are playing on a mouse and keyboard while the configuration of the standard layout is straightforward and decent, you cannot change the keybindings for mouse and keyboard. If you are playing on a controller you are able to change all the keybindings and even also have secondary bindings for the buttons. While this is really nice to be able to set up the controller however you want to the lack of this ability for keyboard and mouse is an odd omission on the developers part.
The other major gripe that I have is the multiplayer. The multiplayer works fully as intended and there is no set up issues, however, the multiplayer makes the game extremely easier. The game becomes almost way to easy when a second person is playing. If your co-op buddy or you dies the player becomes a ghost and is able to do a mini blank to clear the bullets around the player. This is done on a timer to help balance things out but still feels that playing with another person makes the game to easy. In addition enemies are not scaled up to another player on the screen. This is probably done to help balance out if one player dies then it is not impossible for the other to finish up the level or even clear the room. This is relatively minor as playing with another person is really fun and engaging. Gungeon allows for another person to hop in on the action and not feel like they are playing tails or any other little brother character.
The game as it stands is one of the more polished rouge-likes to come out in a long time. The theme and the setting of this game make it really stand out from other rouge-likes. I really do hope that in the future we will see some content added to this game in the form of DLC or expansions, free updates are always nice too. While it is a shame that this game completely devoured Nuclear Throne it becomes very apparent to see why. The gameplay feels more polished, the game is less frustratingly hard, and the sense of progression you get in this game are comparable to The Binding Isaac. Nuclear Throne is still a great game but I will find myself playing Enter The Gungeon more as time moves on. As a full package, Enter the Gungeon is definitely an amazing game and will probably make it onto a couple of top of 2016 lists, and deservedly so.