VIDEOGAME IDIOCY HURTS
Oh...my... The "Trashfall" is still slamming this forum at full force.
The world of XBOX shmups is full of surprises, and this time we will take a look at Guntech 2, the sequel of the Android/PC game Guntech.
You've been warned "Tough Boy".
The game offers us two options: Adventure and Arcade. Before talking of each mode let's talk about the difficulty settings: Easy grants you unlimited lives, a Shield Boost of 200% and a 50 reduction of Collision Damages, making the game enjoyable for newcomers. Normal is the standard mode where you're granted three lives, and Hard grants you a single life and throws you more enemies.
Did a Courtroom artist did the Control Layout?
With the options said and done, let's talk about the control layout. The ship has three weapons: The main gun which fires a selected weapon (Fire & Fury for instance or the Shadow Destroyer), the "Buchu" which fires a single purple bullet and the Railgun which fires a weak, yet rapid fire on any direction since it is aimed by the Right Analog Stick. The Chain is not used until the final world, so I'll talk about that one later.
Thunder Force II meets the "Shmuptroid" genre.
Adventure is the main game as it is the campaign that comprises a variety of chapters with its respective number of stages. The structure of the gameplay is more of a maze-explorer where the game will throw you objectives to add the challenge factor. The most predominant is to end the level before the time runs out, so naturally you'll be on a hurry as you have to find out the exit, kill a certain number of enemies and get the number of coins they assigned you while doing additional tasks shooting gate switches to open doors in pure "Shmuptroid" style. While the majority of the stages involve target destruction, the game changes the rules slightly in World 2 as the objective changes to obtain parts of a vaccine and rescue scientists/astronauts. The rescue missions act like this, get close to the surface as soon as the landing indicators appear below your ship, land, wait for the peope to get in the ship, then take off with them. In the final world, you'll be using the Chain which captures crates in the style of Triggerheart Exelica where you have to drop and even throw using the ship's gained speed and make the box pass through the marking laser. You'll be doing this many times in the final world: From carrying fruit boxes to nuclear waste crates.
While the game has interesting ideas, the game is plagued by gameplay flaws: The first one is the Recoil while firing. Each bullet you fire will push your ship back and to make things worse, the recoil effect varies on each weapon. For instance, the Golden Projectile pushes you back way too fast and further than any other weapon in the game, and hitting a wall will be the worst thing you can do since the slightest touch will damage you and to make things worse the game has the infamous Turridamage that I've talked about on many, many, many other shmups where you take damage without having a recovery time from the previous one, draining your health almost immediately. The controls are also a problem because you have this acceleration effect like in the old Atari Asteroids game. But in Asteroids there was no problem since there wasn't obstacles to deal with. Now, when you put that on an Maze Exploration game, there's a lot of trouble because you might end up crashing with something by accident, so most of the times you'll be readjusting your position and keeping your ship in position since the gravity will slowly push you down once the ship's speed stops. For any normal shmupper this means "I'm out of this", and with all justified reasons, the controls in this game are terrible and this could be avoided for the sake of a more playable experience. For the final flaw: Remember the chain thing and its use to capture and throw things?, If the "Anchor-locked" object hits you, you'll be taking damage. It's like Triggerheart Exelica if Exelica took damage from the Anchor-locked enemy.
Good children get their three happy stars.
Although there's only one objective to complete, the game has a reason to throw you two more: Grant you three stars.
Aside of that, the game has a rewarding system for clearing the level within the time limit, grant you experience points and each level up grants you 500 coins.
Collect Them All!
To complete the sense of exploration during your missions in Adventure Mode, each enemy destroyed will be unlocking aliens on the Aggression Corporation's database, this also includes the bosses.
Keep in mind, each enemy is an achievement after unlocking them in the database. So keep an eye on each level and leave no sector unseen.
Thanks for that, you save me a few thousand coins!
Killing a specific boss at the end of each world can grant you a reward, like a free ship, saving you time and coins from buying it if you get stucked on a level.
Five worlds with a bunch of levels inside.
Clearing a few stages will unlock the previous one to revisit them if you want to get a missing star (Side-objective) or just replay them to get more coins which you'll use them later.
Welcome to Guns-R-Us "X-press".
Unlocking ships are not the only feature of the game, you can also buy them if you don't want to play until you reach the boss, but that will require a lot of grinding for a few coins. Ships can be leveled up to a maximum of Level 7 increasing the overall strength of armor and slight firepower for the main gun, while the Railgun retains its default power levels. After selecting your ship, you can also buy weapons for it and even level them up. But keep in mind, each level has its own price tags, and sometimes could be way too high compared to the proportion "Price-Stage Reward" equation requiring even more grinding and repeating levels constantly. The best strategy is to replay the boss stages again and again.
The Trick-or-Treat Space Shooter.
Along with the traditional campaign, there's the "World 0" which is the "Seasonal". This world consists of three levels: Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day. While the Halloween level plays like the rest of the stages, the other two play on their own house rules: Christmas sends your ship with the "Giftbox" gun which fires gifts. The main objective of the level is to "drop" around 20 gifts to a few houses. Valentine's Day on the other side sends you with the flower throwing "Rose" gun, the real objective is to pop balloons to make them drop teddy bears so you can pick them and fire them with the B button to each house. Looks like Deathsmiles II is not just the only Christmas-themed shmup around.
Boy, have we got a mission for you...
GUNTECH 2: Where nothing can possibly go w o rn g !
The game is broken beyond belief. To being with, some levels have unobtainable objectives, like the Christmas-themed "Help Santa!" stage, where the third objective is to get 50 coins that don't exist!, so you're not gonna get all the three stars on all levels. Along with that, there's two instances of glitches in the boss stages: The first one is where the camera zooms out of the combat zone, forcing you to quit and select the stage again. The second is the most common: The ship appears like normal, but it won't move no matter what you do, also requiring a game quit and select the stage again. Also, while your ship spawns (The "Get Ready" thing), you can use the recoil to leave the zone and navigate the outside part of the area. You can use that trick on the "Wind" stage to fly around the level and enter through the exit on the right, but you gotta be quick and use the Super Mesmerizer gun fast, or else your ship will get stucked on a rock and there's nothing you can do if that happens.
Also, when you quit the game, there's times when you can't enter the main menu. You can hear the confirmation sound by pressing "A" on the opening cutscene, but nothing will happen unless you watch the whole cutscene or close the game and re-open it. Also, the third ship which is unlocked by defeating the Dark Lord boss won't unlock, but you can buy it with your coins. Apparently, nobody tested this game.
*Insert your own ending text here*
After facing a series of worlds with their respective bosses, bad controls, constant glitches and destroying the final boss, this is what you get. "Congrats!" as if you cleared any of the previous worlds and after that you're kicked back to the opening sequence. Zero rewards, condecorations or cutscenes, two or three days of suffering with this game for nothing.
Fine. Let me fix that for you.
Mission Accomplished. You've got rid of the virus.
The galaxy was saved, and you're going to a pool party with Lea and Emilie.
I mean, if they've already pulled an introduction cutscene, we deserved an ending, regardless of how cliché or generic could be, but an ending, not a kick in the groin such as being thrown back to the opening as if the game was resetted or something.
Put the score indicator, remove the "Retry" and voila!
Arcade Mode without efforts.
The second mode is the Arcade Mode, which is pretty much the same as the original Adventure Mode. The only difference is that the game adds a score indicator on the upper right corner and removes the "Retry" option when you get Game Over. Unfortunately, it suffers the same ship freezing glitch when you reach the Boss stage, but that doesn't matter since the achievement "Reach a boss level in arcade mode" unlocks after spawning on the level.
Like the advertising blurb of Blazing Star said:
"Eye-catching, finely drawn machinery!"
The game has a lot of bad flaws, but there's a few positive aspects along with its Gamerscore Milker nature and that's the graphics as we have high definition frame rate and incredibly detailed ships and enemies, although these details can only be noticed in the selection screen and the Database since the rest of the game feels a little microscopic due to the small size of your ship. My main complain could be that the game takes place in space all the damn time regardless of the theme of each stage. 100% of the game is on the black void despite if we are in a space station, a garden or a laboratory, this makes the game repetitive and boring at the same time. One of the "garden" enemies, the man eating plant looks like a piranha plant that would fit quite well on a Mario game rather than a space shmup.
Shameless COVID-ploitation.
Just like the game has different themes blended with sci-fi, there's also real world references as well. Dr. Virx is basically a COVID-19 cell, something that, based on how many people died of this disease, it shouldn't be considered as a joke matter or pop-culture thing. Like I said in my review of Nano Assault NEO-X it reminds me of Seanbaby's joke about terminal cancer when he wrote the review of Wayne's World for the NES.
Seanbaby wrote:Basing a game on an obvious fad isn't a good idea. You're only going to trick people into playing it for a few months before it's thrown out with the pet rocks and the jerry curl activator. If you really want to make a bad game, base it on a fad with some staying power. Terminal cancer has been sweeping the nation for decades, and a game cashing in on the terminal cancer craze would have been just as fun as Wayne's World. Cancer's not going away either. Years from now, little kids will be in the video game store, find Terminal Cancer Blasters, and say, "Wow! My grandma has terminal cancer! Mom! Can we get this game? It's about dead grandmas!"
The music on the other side, is quite incredible, despite being recycled from their previous game. The best example is World 3 "The Dark Worlds" (you can hear it here), which is fast paced metal rocking in the styles of Angra, the Thunder Force series, The Hurt Process ("My Scandinavian Ride" to be exact) and Meshuggah.
TRIVIATECH 2
That explains the "I've saw that before" feeling.
- The "Abstract Ant" logo of Aggression Corporation resembles the bee from DonPachi.
- The kanji on the Mars Probe says "Explorer".
- The initial release had four broken achievements: "Stanford Probe", "Narwhal Probe", "Max out a ship" and "Fly" since the mentioned enemies weren't included, and a bug where the Stingray and the Hellcat get stucked in levels 5 and 7 keeping them from reaching level 8. These flaws were fixed on the first update allowing the achievements to be fully unlockable.
- The Valentine's Day level is also an addition from the game's update.
Thank goodness for those words, Nina.
Maze exploration is fun, but when its blended with Turridamage, bad controls, glitches, and unexistant objectives, it becomes infuriating, and that's where Guntech 2 falls in: The borderline of unplayability. The graphics and the music might be its redeeming qualities, but great audiovisuals doesn't make a good game when the main part is broken.
This game is EASILY the winner of the "Worst Shmup of 2022", because I can't believe that such a broken game could made its way to the XBOX Store.
*Sing "Gamer and Turd" to the tune of "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens*
A trash game ¿What the Hell?
Threw my money on the garbage
You're messed up, and you suck
There's nothing that we can do
You're crap, you're the worst
I had more fun playing Atari
What I mean?: You are a turd and a disgrace
Gamerscore Milker you are
And I know they are pathetic
So much wasted time and space on the console
Putrid mess, please begone
So, its time to uninstall you
You'll might be on the store tomorrow
But in my console not
Now you're calling me a bad game?
But you played with me anyway
Got the achievements, and then threw me to the garbage
From the first stage to the end, criticizing me all this time
You called me a mess and I know that I'll be wiped the hell away
I know, I'll be uninstalled
A trash game ¿What the Hell?
Threw my money on the garbage
You're messed up, and you suck
There's nothing that we can do now
You're crap, you're the worst
I had more fun playing Atari
What I mean?: You are a turd and a disgrace
You are right, I'm no R-Type, Thunder Force V or Raiden
Well, I suck, but no one told you to buy me
Call me a turd, fine for me
Go ahead, put me in the garbage
You called me "$#@%" and I know that I'll be wiped the hell away
I know, I'll be uninstalled