What's not to like in Greedy Guns? It 's got tight controls, fluid combat, overall fast-paced gameplay, nice cartoony artwork, a metroidvania structure, low system requirements... It looks like plenty of fun. And yet, I don't recommend it, for a few critical reasons.
[h1]Pros[/h1]
+ The game looks nice.
+ Controls feel natural and works seamlessly.
+ The combat is fun and the enemy variety is engaging.
+ There are lots of invisible check-points, so that you don't frustratingly repeat some annoying sequence from start.
+ Double jump from the start, giving you a nice feeling of moving fast and freely.
[h1]Cons[/h1]
- The story is boring and the characters despicable.
- The exploration element is boring and there is not much to find anyway.
- Despite the Metroivania structure, it feels pretty linear.
- The map is not clear at all (better to put no map than a poor one).
- Sometimes the combat gets boring so you end up just jumping past the enemies.
- Insta-kill razor wheels and pike pits in boss fights.
[h1]Verdict[/h1]
Greedy Guns could not have been great -it lacks a rich atmosphere, a griping story, and overall some kind of creative inspiration. But it could easily have been lots of fun, due to its fast-paced gun combat, fluid platforming, and metroidvania elements. As such, it sorely disappoints: combat feels pointless, platforming soon becomes a chore with the inclusion of instakill components, and the exploration is never properly incentivized.
[h1]Challenging vs. Annoying[/h1]
The main problem of this title is that it tries to be challenging, but gets annoying instead. This is most exemplified in the boss fights. The first boss fights are rather fun, although pretty easy (I usually won them in my first try). Then, you fight a boss you already defeated for the second time, the Guardian. This boss is not difficult at all to beat. It has two fire spreading patterns that you soon learn to avoid, you can spam shoot on him with ease, and once its health drops below halfway, it makes a 'ghost round' with several copies of him firing big exploding magic balls, and you need to focus on the right one. Believe me as I am not in the 'skilled' end of the player spectrum, it's pretty easy.
Then you meet that boss a second time. It's exactly the same (identical patterns and so on, same amount of health) except that you have a instakill razor wheel circling the room. It's easy to avoid it, but if you forget it, or if you get touched by a fire ball right when you needed to dodge (you get 'stunned' for a split second once you're hit), then you die, and need to restart. To be honest, it's not difficult. It just feels rather arbitrary. It's artificial difficulty (cheap insta-kill during an otherwise very easy fight), and it's more annoying (the need to restart this dumb fight) than challenging. It doesn't feel rewarding to beat that guy after the third attempt, it only feels like you went through a chore.
Next boss (a giant bug) is worse. It gets an obvious 'weakpoint' (its eye) that you need to spam shot. But it has one attack which is particularly nasty; it becomes invulnerable and moves around a rock circled with instakill pikes. Avoiding it is more than easy (just stand on the right platform, always the same, and watch this happening), but the whole pattern is boring. First the bug closes its eyes, turns on a 'Psi' field, the rock shakes a little, then the pattern starts. It's just plain boring and you have nothing to do but watch, and wait for the eye to open again to spam shot again.
The trick is, the whole fight happens on three tiny platforms hang over instakill pikes. If you have a second of inattention and fall, you die, and need to restart from the very beginning of the fight. So, the whole thing is super easy (obvious and easy to target weakpoint, easily dodged attack patterns), extremely boring, but you might have to restart it again and again nonetheless due to this instakill feature. As I said: that's not challenging, that's just annoying.
[h1]Metroidvania features are lacking[/h1]
This is a Metroivania. You go through an open-world and unlock abilities to go past barriers. The problem is, there is very little incentive to revisit past areas. First, the whole thing is structured with small sequences, and you would need to go through all of them from a teleporting point to explore. It feels long and needless. Second, the only thing you can find are health increases shards (you need four of them to increase the size of your health bar). That's about the most boring you can think of in a Metroivania.
Third, when you fight enemies, you get money. However, money has very little uses. It allows you to purchase weapons, only when you get the blueprint. It turns out that, when you get a blueprint, you have largely enough money to purchase it right away, so you really don't care about fighting for money (a bit of a shame for a title called 'greedy guns'). And most of the time, there is nothing to purchase. Upgrades would have been an incentive to fight at least.
[h1]Loathable characters[/h1]
That's the last negative point I'm going to address. Why in the world do you make such unpleasant protagonists? As the player, I never wanted to spend more time with this gross, dumb, egoistic character I was supposed to control. When you control a sympathetic character, you want that character to achieve its goal, to survive, to avoid harm. Here, I really didn't mind. The character had no redeeming feature -just a brainless greedy gun.
As for the story, it might unfold later on as I gave up early on, but it's either very boring, or very long to begin. You are ordered by what is obviously the 'real' bad guy to kill some monsters on a planet, and that's it. Of course it will turn out that your boss is trying to steal some deep and evil alien technology and that you have helped him all along, until you realize that and need to stop him. Yaaawn. There is no lore, no sense of the world (you don't feel like navigating a real environment, only like you're moving from one screen to the next), enemies are ridiculous looking monsters, only there to be shot at by your infinite ammo gun. A real misfire.
