And blast you'll. I hope you’re not vulnerable to RSI symptoms if you wish to play Gungrave because you’ll spend nearly the whole time pulling the right trigger to repeatedly blast wave after colour coded wave of bad guys the levels throw at you. There's a handful of neat systems which help make things a bit more engaging than simply mindless blasting. There’s a ‘Beat’ meter which tracks your consecutive landed attacks while contributing both for your end of level score and your Demolition meter. Demolition moves make use of this meter to drag off flashy attacks which do big damage and refill some lost health.
You possess a shield which recharges if you avoid damage of sufficient length and you can help boost it back up by performing an execution move on a stunned enemy, Doom-style. This can be coupled with a whip that you can use to pull stunned enemies to you, or zip yourself to them as a way to move around the battlefield. You’ll gradually unlock more close-combat moves which may be accustomed to break enemies with shields, in addition to Destruction moves and general character stat boosts like extra health insurance and gun damage.
Even with this particular variety of actions and unlocks though, I found the game stopped being all that interesting after the first few levels. Each factory, warehouse and city street setting begins to blend into the next – to the point where it felt just like a breath of fresh air once I reached an amount with a few vegetation. But more than the repetitive environments, the repetitive enemies and combat encounters really started to grate prior to getting to the end. New enemy types are introduced so gradually, and half the time don’t really demand a different method of play to anything you’ve encountered before. Mash the trigger, use the Destruction moves as they charge, and dodge when you can.
Every time I played I got the distinct impression that the Gungrave G.O.R.E. requires a bunch more polish. I found some consistent bugs through my play through like a door which was designed to open after an encounter just… not opening. Walking into a room, being blasted back through the door just like it automatically closed and so i was stuck in a hallway until I restarted in the checkpoint. Music that doesn’t loop properly, instead just reaches the end of a track and begins again. And perhaps most annoyingly, cut scene audio was consistently blown out. Volume was considerably greater than the standard game audio with voices sounding like they’d been amplified to inside an inch of the life. This persisted despite closing and re-opening the game. Level and encounter design was messy too. Bosses which are just sudden difficulty spikes, and some regular level encounters just threw an unreasonable quantity of tanky enemies within an extremely uninteresting attempt for creating difficulty.
Having done some investigation on the original 2002 Gungrave game, it can make me wish Iggymob had borrowed from it’s cel-shaded anime-like visual style. While G.O.R.E. looks technically impressive, it will be doesn’t have the same personality with it’s lightly stylised visuals. On PS5 it held up a regular 60 fps in performance mode despite waves of enemies and objects in the scene breaking everywhere. There’s a quality mode which turns on ray-tracing in the cost of a 30-fps cap, but
I found the less fluid movement didn’t suit an action-focused game like this. I didn’t inflict Digital Foundry style pixel counting, but in performance mode everything was super sharp on the 4K display. Things look pretty spectacular when you’ve got the environment smashing around you, enemies coming from all directions and shots flying every which way – it’s only a shame the environments and enemies are extremely repetitive and soulless.
There is absolutely some fun to be found in Gungrave G.O.R.E. The over-the-top combat is spectacular to look at sometimes, and blasting at waves of numerous colour coded enemies is definitely fun for some time. Sadly, it is only some time. For the majority of my 7-ish hours of play time I simply found myself studying the motions. The storyline didn’t do much to take a position me on the planet and the environments and enemies were just so repetitive.
