GUNGUNGUN

Fast-paced shooters are designed to keep you on edge and improve your reflexes, which is great if you like to play your games at the speed of light. However, it’s not enough to make everything move quickly, because the controls must be responsive and accurate as well. Thus, developing a shoot ‘em up is way tougher than it seems on paper.

GUNGUNGUN is a 2D shooter in which your only goal is to survive on top of a moving train by killing all the enemies that try to destroy you. There’s nothing more to it than that, but the formula is fun enough to keep you engaged for quite some time, at least if you are a fan of the genre. However, it needs more variety to remain fun for more than a few minutes at a time.

In essence, you play as a girl who stole a couple of weapons and is about to be attacked by the bandits she stole them from. The police is on its way as well, which means that the only thing left to do is to start shooting and hope that you are going to be the last man standing. The game keeps track of your stats and informs you whenever you hit a high score, although a lot of other data is saved as well.

Your character has a finite number of lives, and you lose one whenever one of the enemies hits you with a bullet or some kind of explosive. There are multiple map layouts to play on, and they are randomly chosen by the game every time you start a new round, but they still get repetitive after a while. You can also find a variety of guns around the map, each one of which has different specifications.

Lastly, the controls are good enough not to be a bother, which is important in a fast-paced shooter such as this one. Granted, there’s not much you can do other than move, jump and shoot, but it’s nice to see that the character responds instantly to your input. As for the graphics, there’s nothing particularly exciting about them, which should be fixed in later versions.

In the end, GUNGUNGUN quite clearly has a few things it needs to work on, but so far the game shows a lot of promise. Hence, it’s worth keeping an eye on it to see how everything goes, but you can enjoy it for a few minutes even now.