Shotguns add fun to any shooting game, whether it’s a platformer like Spelunky or a multiplayer shooter like the Call of Duty series. The authors of Gunbrella are of the same opinion – the main character has only one weapon, but it’s a shotgun, which he never gets tired of using until the credits roll.
Murder weapon
The protagonist had a tragedy – after returning home from work, he found his wife in a pool of blood. An unknown criminal left a weapon next to her corpse, the so-called umbrella shooter, mentioned in the title of the game. It looks like an ordinary umbrella, but in reality it is a powerful shotgun capable of smashing any target to pieces. Driven by a thirst for revenge, the hero takes an umbrella arrow and sets off to look for its owner, eliminating along the way everyone who gets in his way.
Management made as convenient as possible. With one button we fire a weapon, and with the other we perform all sorts of tricks with an umbrella, of which there are several. You can jump and open it in the chosen direction to make a kind of double jump. You can simply open it in the fall so that, like Mary Poppins, you slowly fly to the ground. If someone shoots at a character, just open the umbrella in time – it’s bulletproof. And if you do this right before the shell hits, it will be deflected towards the enemy.
It’s easy to imagine how fun it would be to mix up shooting and umbrella tricks. At the same time, the developers did not add too many enemies, but placed them further away from each other. From the outside it seems like a wrong decision, but as I progressed I liked it more and more – the gameplay didn’t get boring, and I was able to find different approaches to different opponents. Someone should be eliminated after he approaches the edge of the platform, someone should be released further away to shoot him in the back, and someone should be deflected by projectiles.
The only sad thing is that the http://eurokingcasino.uk/ shotgun turns out to be too powerful, so you ignore many gameplay mechanics. There are cartridges with which the gun fires differently – for example, in bursts – and you can even buy them in the store, but I never wanted to use this. The umbrella shooter can be upgraded, but there are only two upgrades – to reload speed and damage – and they are barely noticeable. Well, food that restores health was useful only in a few cases – it is often easier to die and resurrect at the nearest control point, fortunately they are generously spaced, and there are no penalties for death.
So no difficulties Gunbrella does not cause – I played on medium difficulty and died only a few times; I doubt that at high levels the situation would have changed much. Even in boss fights, problems rarely arise. I liked these battles because you always need to move and actively use the umbrella both for shooting and moving. But if the boss wasn’t cleared the first time, I usually beat it easily the second or third time, having roughly understood what tactics to follow.
Jumping and flying
The design of the locations may seem simple, but this is due to the fact that such “pixel” platformers too often turn out to be metroidvanias – with huge confusing regions, the need to return to explored places, gain new abilities, and so on. Gunbrella does not belong to this genre – this is a more or less classic two-dimensional adventure, at times reminiscent more of Mega Man than some Hollow Knight . There’s not even a map here, and there’s no need for one – the characters will always tell you where to go, and it’s impossible to get confused. There are secret passages and rooms, but there are very few of them – you run through locations at high speed, without being distracted by anything.
Therefore, when there are many obstacles in the levels, it is more interesting to play. There is a magnificent episode at the top of the mountain, during the passage of which I involuntarily remembered Celeste – with “gluing” to the walls, hooks, cables and using an umbrella after almost every jump. It’s not difficult (although my experience in similar platformers probably shows), but in such dynamic moments the mechanics are revealed best. It’s a pity that it takes about an hour to get to the first such episode – before that you go through a classic platformer with rare opponents and basic tests.
This description is also true for the plot. At first it’s a little boring to follow, since there is no normal introduction to the game, and the characters in the first cities don’t seem interesting at all – you don’t know anything about this universe and don’t understand who all these people are. But then, when you find out more details, you become more willing to immerse yourself in the world – you meet local clans, learn about an extremist cult, save the kidnapped mayor of one of the cities, and so on. And it becomes curious who actually killed the main character’s wife.
This is largely due to the charming graphics – one of the best examples of pixel art in games of 2023. The local style combines Western, noir, and steampunk – an explosive mixture, the analogues of which are difficult to remember. The game tries to be both dark and funny, and this is reflected not only in the atmosphere and graphics, but also in the dialogue – there is humor and serious discussions about the difficulties of family life. It even has my favorite “trick” of retro platformers – letters jumping in dialogues, allowing you to better convey the emotions of the characters without voice acting.
I wouldn’t rank Gunbrella among the best releases Devolver Digital, but the game turned out well – it’s stylish, exciting and memorable. Not all of its mechanics are fully revealed, since the difficulty is quite low, but the main thing is that running with a shotgun is just as fun here as in many action games. The umbrella shooter has become one of my favorite guns in video games lately – I’d love to see a sequel that would give me a reason to fly between platforms again, shooting at annoying opponents.
Pros: nice pixel art that combines several styles; Instant switching between shooting and platforming makes the gameplay fun; the story gets interesting when it picks up speed.
Cons: low complexity, due to which some mechanics are unnecessary; The plot is not intriguing at first.
