Gunnihilation Demo

Retro shooters were highly regarded back in the day, especially if you remember games like Contra and all the other famous names. The one thing that represented them was the unforgiving difficulty level, given the fact that there was no autosave function back in the day and a limited number of retries. On the other hand, that made it so much fun to keep playing, even if frustration levels were sky high.

Gunnihilation is a challenging action-platformer playable in up to four players at once in co-op, and it sports the classic fast-paced gameplay mechanics, plus a huge number of enemies to fight against. Thus, everything moves very quickly and you must react just as fast, otherwise you are hit by one of the dozen projectiles coming toward you at any given second.

There’s not much of a story to talk about, because it’s not all that important in a game such as this one. In short, there’s an evil organization trying to take over the world, and you play the role of a soldier trying to fight against it. Speaking of which, there are multiple game modes to choose from, depending on whether you want to follow the story and try the campaign mode, or just score as many points as you can in the survival mode.

The action is incredibly fast-paced after the first introductory levels, and you may need a bit of practice to get the hang of it. Each type of enemy has a specific attack, and it’s vital that you know how to avoid them all. Thankfully, the controls are very accurate and responsive, especially if you happen to have a gamepad handy. The keyboard is fine as well, but maybe a tad slower, considering the twin-stick functionality of the game.

Despite the somewhat modern components included with Gunnihilation, such as controller support and modern game modes, the graphics are designed to look as old-school as possible. On the other hand, they are still very detailed and expressive, which is not something you can say about all the retro games released nowadays. The soundtrack is engaging as well.

Even if Gunnihilation may not please everyone, the gameplay is refined and polished enough to gain a cult following sometime in the future, at least if the game receives enough attention. The co-op modes are very addictive, especially in local multiplayer.