There’s a good chance your parents have told you that video games are a waste of time. They are, but at least they’re fun. They give you something to do with your brain while you relax. You can do some problem solving while having fun. There are games, however, that are a complete waste of time. They provide so little in the way of fun, challenge or engagement that they make your brain deteriorate.
Gungrave G.O.R.E. is one such game. It’s so bland, simple, easy, and repetitive that it will lull you to sleep with your eyes open. It’s so devoid of anything, that playing it is bad for your intelligence, which is why I have peppered this review with big, unfitting, SAT-words to enrich your vocabulary and undo the IQ loss the game inflicted upon me. Watch for the italicized words. We’re about to get sesquipedalian.
Gungrave G.O.R.E. is a third person shooter with delusions of being a stylish spectacle game. It has a combo system, it grades you at the end of missions, it blends shooting with melee combat. You play as an edgy assassin with a coffin that shoots out giant missiles and turns into a saw. You can blast hundreds of enemies in a single level and punch them so hard they explode, all while an evil skull watches and laughs at the carnage. On paper, this is the raddest game ever.
In practice, it falls flat on every front. It wears the clothes of a fun, stylish game without the credentials to back it up. It’s a man dressed like a biker, but he doesn’t even own a motorcycle. It’s all signifier that signifies nothing.
A signifier is a sign or word, the signified is the concept. The word “dog” is the signifier, and a real dog would be the signified. Gungrave has the signifiers of a hardcore game, but the signified, the actual gameplay and systems that would make it a hardcore game, are nowhere to be found.
Starting with what you’ll be doing for most of the game: shooting. It’s technically true that the player shoots in this game. You press a button, and that causes bullets to come out from your gun and into an enemy, but this implies that it’s something you actively do. You shoot at anything and everything. You don’t have to aim, you don’t have to consider which enemies are a more immediate threat and need to be taken out first, you don’t aim at one specific thing. You press the button and if you’re shooting in the general direction of an enemy, you’re doing fine.
You don’t have to dodge or move around while shooting, either. Your movement is slow, and heavy. You’re meant to trudge forward and bulldoze through enemies while firing. Most enemies use hitscan weapons, so you can’t even dodge their shots. You don’t even have to move to advantageous positions. Enemies will surround you, and it’s not because you failed to find a good spot in the arena, it’s because that’s what they do. Getting surrounded isn’t even a threat. You can keep blasting like normal and shred through them before they can do any damage.
Even a “primitive” shooter like DOOM ’93 has more interesting shooting than this. There you had enemies that wanted to kill you, that made you dodge projectiles and posed a threat if you let them get close. Gungrave manages to feel even more primitive than a game that came out 30 years prior.
“But it’s not about the shooting! It’s about the style!” I hear you vociferate, or argue loudly. Okay, what style? Shooting at enemies and then hitting them with a limp 3-hit melee combo? Because that’s all the “style” you’re getting. Sure, the game has style. It’s all visual. The things you do in the game, the things you interact with, are incredibly limited and about as stylish as a pocket protector. You can shoot and you can melee. You don’t have juggles, extended combos, movement techniques, nothing.
Maybe I’m in the wrong for expecting something this game isn’t. Its description on Steam reads (emphasis added):
Gungrave G.O.R.E is a stylish third-person action shooter by South-Korean Studio IGGYMOB in which you take on the role of Grave, a gunslinger of resurrection and badass anti-hero of your dreams, mowing down tons of enemies in a gory ballet of bullets.
-Description on its Steam Page
With a description like that I picture Bayonetta dancing from enemy to enemy riddling them with bullets, or something like ULTRAKILL where you’re flying around switching weapons mid-combo to style on your opponents. Gungrave is none of these things. I can’t stress enough how disappointing it is.
There is a second character that has a move which grabs an enemy, throws them in the air and juggles them with his pistols like Dante does in Devil May Cry. I was excited when I saw it because I thought that meant he had a juggle mechanic. I was already getting ahead of myself (and the game) thinking of ways this could be used. Throw one guy in the air, shoot him, then take care of the others while he’s still in the air and finish him off when he lands. Or maybe you can keep multiple enemies afloat if you’re quick enough, but no. The move is a stiff, pre-programmed animation. You press the button, your guy grabs the enemy, throws him, shoots him, and stops. You can’t move during this whole thing, you can’t cancel out of it, you can’t really cancel into it, either. It’s like those long executions modern games love so much.
Another stylish misfire is the combo system. A combo system is a lot like the cherry on top of a sundae: It puts a finishing touch on something great to give it that extra little oomph. Scoring systems in general are always welcome. The combo counter and its ratings are the signifier, skilled play the signified. If you cause a number to go up with titles like “RAGE!” “MASSACRE!” “DISCOMBOBULATION!”, it means that you’re doing something worthy of being labeled in big, red letters. This system left me discombobulated, as it confused and disconcerted me. The game heaped praise on me with giant numbers just for mashing the fire button like a baboon.
The system works like this: shoot things to keep the combo going. That’s it. No, I didn’t miss anything, it’s that simple. A bare-bones scoring system isn’t a bad thing by itself, but when everything else about the game is bland, having a bland combo system on top is like promising candy to a kid and then giving them sugar-free candy corn.
By “Shoot things” I really do mean shoot things. You shoot enemies, but to maintain a combo between encounters you’ll be shooting at the environment. There is no technique or artistry to this. You keep mashing the fire button to shoot at interactable props in the levels. You don’t aim at anything in particular, you blast away and hope the thing you’re hitting contributes to your combo.
This system of environmental destruction is supposed to be reminiscent of the shootouts from Trigun or Desperado, where gunfights shred the scenery in a hail of bullets and wrecked furniture. The intention is there, but the execution, like everything else in this game, falls flat on its face. Things exist in two states: Intact and destroyed. There are no in-between stages where, for example, the vending machine you’re shooting has its glass riddled with bullet holes. It’s there, unperturbed by your bullets, until it suddenly pops into a few pieces in a way that feels completely disconnected from your input. Unperturbed means “not concerned”.
Even the enemies react like this when shot. They flinch when hit, sometimes, and that’s the only indication that they’re being hurt. They only bleed when they die. You might say that the sudden gush of blood works as a visual indicator to say “stop shooting, he’s already dead”, but you’re just going to keep shooting at the twelve other guys right next to him anyways. Your game plan is unaffected. Shoot in a vague direction until nothing is there.
Sometimes they explode into pieces. Not from particularly hard shots, explosions, getting cut or from a missile. They will explode sometimes. Not in an extravagant way, either. Remember, this is Gungrave GORE we’re talking about. Everything has to be bland and underwhelming. Enemies suddenly fall apart. Their limbs separate from their torso and just sort of tumble. You can practically see them shrug and say “Eh, I guess I died. I don’t care.” as their head casually strolls off their shoulders.
The enemies don’t care about getting blown up because they really don’t care about anything. They don’t pose a threat to you, even at the higher difficulties. They are the definition of cannon fodder. They exist to be shot at, but this is a shooter, right? Aren’t all enemies in shooters just something to shoot at? Technically, yes, but you shoot them to neutralize a threat. The enemies in GGG are like the filler enemies in Dynasty Warriors; they stand around waiting to die.
Every now and then you get a special enemy, like a rocket launcher or a giant monster. These are slightly more dangerous than regular enemies. Slightly more dangerous than zero is still not very threatening. They don’t even rise to the level of a slight nuisance. Their existence is just as pointless as the small fry, but it takes more shots to kill them.
The rocket launchers and shield boys make you use your melee attacks. There’s a melee system with very rudimentary combos, and just like with everything else in the game, sing along with me you all know the words: “It’s bland and underwhelming!” Very good! You’re paying attention.
You have a three-hit combo where you flail your coffin at enemies. The sudden burst of movement is too much excitement for them, so they get overwhelmed and die. Much like everything else in the game, there isn’t much in the way of feedback to your attacks. There’s barely any hit stop, the sound your attacks make is dull and the enemies sometimes flinch when hit. Sometimes.
There are different combo enders you can purchase. They make your final attack look different. It’s supposed to behave differently as well, but there isn’t much of note. You can get an upgrade that gives you a giant saw blade to cut enemies with. It’s nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. You get a giant saw blade. From a coffin. It’s boring. The game managed to make a GIANT SAW BLADE that you swing around from A COFFIN uninteresting. I said it once before, but it bears repeating now: Coffin. Saw. Blade. Boring.
It takes skill and effort to achieve that. To take something so effortlessly edgy, ridiculous, and ostentatious, and make it something underwhelming. The blade doesn’t feel like it’s interacting with the enemies. There’s barely any feedback. It feels more like Grave is showing everyone his cool new toy, but no one is really impressed. I am impressed by the word ostentatious, which means “designed to impress or attract notice”.
You use melee attacks to knock rockets back, break shields and for when you get bored of shooting. Knocking rockets back with your coffin is about as easy as hitting a beach ball with a tennis racket. The rockets are big, slow-moving projectiles with a bright blue flame. They waddle up to you like a senior citizen who just demolished the Chinese buffet. Batting away rockets is one of the few times you actually have to look out for something and react to it, but if you ignore them, you’ll be fine.
A reason for this lack of urgency is your generous health pool. Generous isn’t the right word here. The game is so liberal with how much health you start with and how much you can recover that it’s downright magnanimous. It’s generous and forgiving, especially toward a rival or a less powerful person. You can take a ton of damage, either because the enemies are weak or because you have the hit points of a raid boss. I played the game through on hard and still thought I couldn’t run out of HP in most encounters.
If you lose some health you can always throw out a Demolition Shot that kills enemies and refills some of your health. The rate at which you get Demolition Shots is way too high. You can use them enough to the point that you stop thinking about them as a resource. If you were to go into a Call of Duty lobby and get a Demolition Shot for every slur you heard, you’d still get less than what the game gives you.
If it were a constant tug-of-war between life and death where the only thing keeping you alive were the demolition shots, it’d be interesting. Going up against highly-lethal, deathly minacious enemies. Constantly walking a tight rope trying to stay alive, a few shots away from death but throwing out carefully timed demolition shots to scrape a little health back to keep you going. That would be interesting, but it’s not how it happens. You’re always at a comfortably high level of health. Minacious means dangerous, if you hadn’t figured it out via context clues.
The only time I was ever in danger of running out of health was in the boss fight. Two hours into the game you get your first boss fights. Boss fights plural. You fight the same guy in three different phases. You empty his life bar, get a cutscene, you think it’s over and he’s back up for another round. Three times. The third time he starts posing a bit of a challenge, at least on hard mode, because several of his attacks can kill you in one hit. This was the only spot of difficulty in the game, and I managed to lose, but after another try he folded like a lawn chair and the game went back to being nothing.
That being the first boss fight is an inaccuracy. As I was going through my screenshots, I found one of a large monster with a health bar. I remember this being a normal fight since the boss doesn’t do anything of note, he just dies slower than the others.
There’s an operator character that keeps barking at you throughout the levels. She screams at you “GRAVE!” and tells you something obvious. “GRAVE! THERE ARE ENEMIES ABOVE YOU!” “GRAVE! SHOOT THE ENEMIES!”. It gets very annoying. It’s like your crewmates’ constant chatter in Star Fox 64 but with none of the charm or quotable lines.
Repetitive sound is a running theme in this game. The enemies yell out the same two or three taunts at you constantly, your operator chimes in with the same few obvious shrieks, every explosion sounds equally flaccid, lacking force or effectiveness. You fire your guns constantly and their sound varies so little that it becomes background noise, and you stop hearing it.
There isn’t a moment of silence in the game, but not because it’s non-stop action. It’s because you have to shoot all the time, and everything is constantly yelling at you and exploding. It’s noise pollution.
The music isn’t much better. There are a few upbeat tracks that play in battles, and they sound okay. There are others that play in the two or three seconds per level where you’re not fighting. These tracks bugged out a few times and played during the gunfights, so you had a mess of gunfire and explosions with this lullaby playing in the background:
These slower-paced tracks suit the fights better. They reflect the player’s boredom. Some elevator music would have fit, too. I was hearing it throughout most of the game, but it was playing inside my head. This game demands so little of you that your mind wanders. When playing, 98% of my time was spent thinking about what to make for dinner, one percent thinking about what button to press, and the last percent was my brain replaying the Scooby-Doo caveman meme on repeat.
What I wanna know is where’s the gameplay?
The levels are like a graph of the player’s brain activity when playing: a straight line. They’re linear, but they have these small alcoves, recessed sections of room, and dead-end alleys every now and then. They seem like the sort of place you’d find some collectible or secret, but there’s nothing in them. That should have been obvious since the game doesn’t have anything to collect. There are no resources other than Health, Shields, and Supers, all which are refilled in combat. The weird corners and empty rooms are there for no reason at all. You check them at first. There wouldn’t be a useless, empty room there, right? After the third or fourth time, you realize that there is in fact nothing there other than your wasted time.
At least the game looks nice. That’s a positive. Grave’s character model is nicely detailed and so are the environments. Grave’s animations are good, too. They have no impact because the enemies don’t react appropriately, but they look okay in a vacuum.
One question about the in-game visuals: What’s up with the ubiquitous, ever-present green gas?
It keeps happening
It’s like when there’s construction going on far away, and you hear jackhammers going but you don’t really notice them until you really listen and realize what was annoying you. I had been seeing the green gas in some levels and thought it was a quirk of the stage I was in. Then it kept showing up in other stages and I did a Jerry Seinfeld and asked, “What’s the deal with all this gas?”.
At first I thought it was poison, but it doesn’t harm you. It just sort of sits there obnubilating the arena. That’s a fun word. It means to darken or obscure. It comes from Latin, and it means “to cloud”. This word and its definition are way more interesting than anything in this game.
The cutscenes look nice. The game features fully voiced animated cutscenes with dynamic camera angles and good lighting.
To turn a positive into a negative, I think they could have used that cutscene money to make the game better. I don’t care about the cutscenes. If I’m not pressing buttons, I skip it. The parts where I am pressing buttons stink. I complained about the environmental destruction being bad. Making damage models for props in the environment and making sure they act appropriately when shot takes a lot of time and money. You know what else takes a lot of time and money? Cutscenes!
As I was playing Gungrave G.O.R.E. I had a feeling of Déjà vu. A stylish action game where you spend most of your time shooting dual pistols at boring enemies. A limited melee combo system that is overshadowed by the guns. Tedious encounters. Two playable characters. PS2-era action. Then it hit me…
The closest thing you can compare this game to is Devil May Cry. Devil May Cry TWO, that is. When your game reminds someone of DMC2, it’s time to hang up your controller. You’re in the bad part of PS2 town there.
There have been several people who think this game is “flashy, dumb fun”. It is flashy. and it is dumb. Boy is it dumb. It’s downright moronic, but it’s not fun. I love simple, arcade-style games, but only if they actually offer any entertainment. GGG gets even less points for promising stylish combo action and delivering a wet, sloppy pile of “mash the trigger and punch every now and then”.
Now, to review our vocabulary:
In this sesquipedalian essay on this discombobulated game, I must say I remain unperturbed at its ostentatious attempts at style. If I were magnanimous, I’d say something more positive about the game, but its flaccid gameplay made me want to hide in an alcove and cry. Even there I could not escape its ubiquitous green gas of terrible sound design and repetitive gameplay that only served to obnubilate my mood. Prolonged exposure to this game is minacious to your mental health. Hopefully this little vocabulary review serves to rehabilitate some injured neurons.
In conclusion, this game is poopy dog doo-doo in a smelly green fart burrito.
