You possibly can’t fault the pitch. In Gunbrella you’re a form of cowboy dude with a shotgun that’s additionally an umbrella. You employ the umbrella to deflect enemy projectiles, block assaults, fly up into the air like a livid Mary Poppins and zoom alongside ziplines. You employ the shotgun, as you would possibly fairly anticipate, to do nearly all of your massive murdering.
Gunbrella is a traditional 2D platform shooter within the type of a steampunk western. It’s like Deadwood crossed with Singin’ In The Rain, if Gene Kelly ever used his umbrella to blow holes via anybody who didn’t sufficiently reward his faucet dancing. Some gentle exploration bits have you ever travelling by practice from frontier cities to mining villages, a lot of them adorned with big spinning cogs – so you realize it’s steampunk – and populated by a small solid of quest-giving locals, pill-dispensing shopkeepers and monologuing villains.
Similar to with Gene Kelly and his magical ft, your umbrella unlocks a variety of enjoyable and nimble traversal choices. You should utilize your gunbrella to sprint forwards and backwards. You possibly can pop it open in mid-air to successfully double-jump. You possibly can hook it on to ziplines to whizz alongside them in both course, up and down, physics be damned. And you’ll glide on the wind, like everybody’s favorite demonic British nanny.
In fight the umbrella turns into a defend, however time the opening of your brolly completely and also you’ll deflect pictures straight again at their homeowners. Your shotgun packs a satisfying, gutsy punch too. Pull the set off when standing shut sufficient to your goal and also you’ll ship sizzling, moist physique components scattering in every single place, like a butcher’s van dropping its cargo on the motorway, portray streaks of gore up the partitions and throughout the ground.
Gunbrella has been described – not by the builders, thoughts – as a Metroidvania sort of factor, nevertheless it doesn’t match into that style. Whilst you do revisit some cities, there’s none of that traditional backtracking to entry beforehand blocked-off areas with freshly unlocked talents. As an alternative that is an virtually completely linear journey, with some branching and looping dungeon-style ranges as you progress additional and additional east in direction of your aim. The sport is lots narrower in scope than a Metroidvania fan is perhaps anticipating, and retains a agency concentrate on ahead progress and encounters with more and more good enemies. Gunbrella is extra Cave Story, much less Hole Knight.
Messing round with the gunbrella is the driving pressure of the sport, so it’s an excellent factor that it’s a basically enjoyable instrument to make use of, with loads of alternatives to make use of it. As you progress you unlock new sorts of ammunition to increase your fight repertoire. A machine gun enables you to decide off enemies from lengthy vary. Grenades allow you to take out patrolling teams of baddies from behind cowl. Afterward, you may tag enemies with sticky bombs. Delightfully, as a result of Gunbrella solely ever makes use of two buttons – ‘hearth gun’ and ‘open umbrella’ – you set off your sticky bombs to detonate simply by opening your umbrella. There’s a mild logic there that’s deeply pleasing – a bit like that outdated idiom, “if the one instrument you’ve got is a hammer, each drawback appears like a nail”. Besides with umbrellas.
As entertaining because the blasting and umbrella-batics all is, Gunbrella struggles to evolve into way more than an easy side-scrolling shooter. The stuff that spills out of lifeless enemies’ pockets hints at a extra complicated recreation that by no means fairly reveals up. Cogs are a forex that can be utilized to improve your gunbrella, for instance, although there are solely two upgrades you may ever buy: sooner reload occasions and elevated assault energy. These make little materials distinction to the core loop of flying and bouncing across the display screen, giddily blasting away at baddies till they’re goop.
The cash you acquire can be utilized to purchase capsules or prepare dinner meals, which restore well being or provide you with short-term additional hearts. However save factors and vitality-restoring benches are so liberally dotted round Gunbrella’s world, and the punishment for failure isn’t greater than only a minute of your time, that loss of life isn’t one thing to be afraid of and even actively keep away from. Should you encounter a very difficult room, it’s often faster and much more enjoyable to repeatedly throw your self again into the combat than it’s to backtrack, prepare dinner up a number of extra rats, bolster your well being and check out once more.
These gentle cooking and upgrading choices unintentionally underscore the components of Gunbrella that aren’t truly current – somewhat strategic depth, customisation and added complexity that by no means reveals itself within the few hours it takes to achieve the sport’s finish – however crucially they by no means get in the way in which of the great things both: the taking pictures and the operating and the leaping round together with your shotgun that additionally occurs to be an umbrella.
Gunbrella is a brief and intensely enjoyable little shooter, whose largest fault is often luring you into wanting it to be one thing greater than it truly is. What’s here’s a bouncy, blasty, extremely unique 2D platformer with a foolish and fascinating weapon at its core, set in a grimy soiled steampunk western world, with dialogue that’s cute however not too cute, a catchy musical rating and a display screen that shakes excellent whenever you hearth your shotgun into a man.
