GUNHEAD

Incredibly disappointing sequel to Cryptark, pretty much every change has been for the worse. First of all, it's heavily casualized: remember how in Cryptark you had to choose not only which weapons to bring with you, but also how much ammo? Not anymore, now weapon unlocks and their ammo are carried with you the whole campaign, finding a second copy of a weapon you already have fully refills its ammo (kinda, more on that later), and at every time while on a mission you can pause the game and magically equip the weapon you need right then and there. Remember how passive upgrades took up an item slot and were expensive? Now they're permanently equipped once you find them, and they can stack too (well, you can pick up multiple, some of them have no effect after the first one and a lot of them have broken effects after the first one, more on that later). Speaking of item slots, you don't need multiple of them anymore, as you can swap between items just as easily as weapons. Enemy variety is also lower: the two elite drones that made the late game of Cryptark so challenging are gone, the only new drone is a pathetic flamethrower drone that barely qualifies as a threat, and now some ships have "bosses" that are completely trivial even if you don't oneshot them with the railgun. System levels are gone, a system is exactly as capable on the first ship of the campaign as it is on the last. Defense turrets on the outside of the ships are still there, but nerfed so hard it's difficult for them to hit you even when you forget they're there. There's a looping mechanic that is incredibly boring, you just go through comically large ships oneshotting everything as you stack damage ups while none of the opposition scales. Then, the switch to 3d was a mistake: not only is the artstyle much blander than it was in 2d, not only is the performance much worse (especially in larger ships), but the game mechanics have suffered as well. Enemies and hazards have been ported almost 1 to 1 from Cryptark in terms of behavior, but now that you can't see all around you a lot of them are very frustrating: it's not rare to enter from an airlock and find an alarm laser (or worse, a minefield) staring down on you, and getting shot in the back as you try to exit an airlock is basically routine (yes, you have to face the object you're trying to interact with, more on that later). Movement is horrendous: in theory you have to manage your jetpack fuel, but in practice you can easily fly forever by tapping spacebar and you'll still have plenty of fuel to spare for dashes, and as a result you'll rarely if ever touch the floor as there is simply no reason to. Sure, you can unlock alternate mech suits to work around that, but they're a clumsy solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. The worse consequences of 3d, however, are a bit less obvious: for one, the game runs worse, so it needs to partially unload far away rooms to make up, so rooms need to be clearly separated by tiny semi-transparent doors to hide the loading/unloading, so ships feel a lot less organic and interesting and more like a very simple assembly of basic building blocks. Ah, and since distant rooms are unloaded, it's impossible for far away enemies to pursue you, wander around, or interact in general: as a result, alarms can't draw in enemies from all over the ship to your position, so now they just lock you in and spawn enemies. Finally, the worst issue is the bugs and lack of polish, they're so bad the hard crashes to desktop of Cryptark look preferable. Passive upgrades stacking was clearly tacked on: the UI doesn't group up upgrades of the same type and can easily run out of space to display them within the first loop, some of them (hazard coating, nuke protection) can't possibly stack but will keep spawning, max health ups result in your mech getting damaged back to its unupgraded max health on mission start, even just two noise downs make every weapon completely silent... To interact with objects you need to be facing them, be close enough (but not too close), and be lucky: the hitboxes are horrendous and from certain angles you just won't be able to interact. If you find a second copy of a weapon you already have equipped, you can equip it over the one you already have equipped, send it to inventory, or equip it in a different slot: the first refills its ammo to max, the second ADDS its max ammo to its current ammo and allows you to bypass the standard ammo cap, the third results in infinite ammo.

The short version of this review would be: Just buy Cryptark instead. But let me elaborate. Gunhead is essentially a 3D reimagining of its prequel Cryptark, which was a 2D game with largely the same gameplay, features and systems. Cryptark is a neat little game and the Idea of giving it verticallity or rather depth is consequently neat-er. And of course it works because it absolutely should. The Problem is that it doesn't do anything beyond that. It doesn't add much beyond the bare minimum translation of its predecessor into 3D. It feels like a chance to expand, add content, go further but the game comes to rest at this weird point where it's not evolved enough to be a sequel, didn't make over enough to be a remake. It feels kind of like a fan game that was done on a tight budged with a strict goal. It feels like we're on the starting point for adding content and further developing the game but the developer stated that that's it. It's finished as it is and to be honest, I expected more.

not sure how this is a 'mostly positive'. lets go point by point. the audio: is bad the gunplay: is bad the voice acting: is good, but good luck hearing anything the VA's are saying due to the aforementioned audio being poorly mixed all around the visual design: is passable. they have massively punched up the contrast of the screenshots on the store page and it looks a lot more flat in gameplay. misrepresentation at best, false advertising at worst. mouse smoothing: is present, and unwelcome so we have a bad sounding, poorly playing, ugly game with very little to redeem it. I hope the devs can take my 5 bucks and make something worthwhile with it. I feel bad being this harsh but I simply do not have the time in this world to waste on mediocre experiences and neither do you.

As it is, it is unplayable. On my first run, fourth stage, an armor system spawned in space - soft-locking me in one way. Luckily i was able to wait for the shuffle system to cycle it back into the ship. Upon completing the level it dropped me through the floor, setting my movement to "home ship" controls but not staging the game forward. this forces me to back out, and i assume take a crap shoot of moving forward. This is a shame, because the game is very close to good. If only it were playable. If this becomes more stable in the future, someone let me know. I'm an ex-WR holder for cryptark speeruns.

If you move the camera quickly from left to right (if you play with high mouse sensitivity for instance) everything is blurry. Fiddling with the in-game graphics options or disabling V-Sync didn't change this. There's a number of poorly made FPS and other first-person games that suffer from this problem, and it makes the experience unplayable for me.

Important Note: GUNHEAD stopped getting updates shortly after release and the devs have said that they moved on after bug fixes and localization so don't expect anything other than the launch content. CRYPTARK is an impressive indie game with some of the best visual and audio design i've seen in a long time. It is complicated, difficult, oppressive, and still holds up fantastically after a decade. GUNHEAD is a good first person port of CRYPTARK but a bad sequel. The entire point of GUNHEAD is "what if CRYPTARK was in first person?" and it does that for the most part. The main objective of the gameplay loop is the same; go to long dead alien fleets and evade the automated defenses to scavenge and get paid by a shady organization. There is nothing new about that loop from the first game to this one and the way you interface with that loop is just less refined and thoughtful. The ship that serves as the main hub and start point for every mission is aesthetically unappealing and annoying to get around to the different systems. The things you can do in the ship are simplistic and needlessly spaced out. The UI and menus are bland and seem like a weak copy and paste from the first game. Combat is admittedly "new" if you consider fighting the same 2D enemies from CRYPTARK with the same mech suits and weapons but in 3D as new. I do appreciate them adding in some interesting bosses with different forms and attack patterns but I find them to be unenjoyable whenever the level has the optional time limit side objective, making the fights feel like a nearly complete guarantee to fail that objective each time. I'm recommending this game because in a vacuum, its a good rougelike with some nice retro FPS gameplay. However, I'm personally disappointed as a big fan of the first game who hoped for much more out of it. I got a good 8 hours of gameplay out of it before I lost interest and felt a much stronger urge to play CRYPTARK again. If you really like the visual design of the setting but want a more feature complete 2D twinstick shooter, go play CRYPTARK. 6.5 or 7/10 feels about right for this game

Dissapointed. This is just blurry, bland, dumbed-down 3D version of Cryptark, which had, IMO, one of the best 2D graphics ever. The soundtrack is the only saving grace

I love Crypark the spiritual successor to this game. I wanted to enjoy Gunhead, but after multiple attempts to get into it, I've decided to refund the game as it's a huge disappointment from someone who loves what they did with the first game. I'm also not a huge fan of this trend of popular 2d indie games doing 3d sequels, and in this case, it's not even a well done conversion to 3d compared to say Risk of Rain 2. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I have boomer brain. It's just not a title for me.

Despite the move to 3D and addition of bosses, this is a significant downgrade from cryptark. The first boss I encountered literally crawled into a corner of the arena and scrunched up as if it was terrified of me, and that was also the hardest one because it kept moving it's weak point around so I couldn't shoot it easily, the other ones were basically free. There are less systems to deal with, only 1 item slot for usable items, instead of finding new weapons to replace the ones we use up we can carry as many as we want but have to spend a lot of money to refill them, costing roughly half as much as unlocking a new weapon. The turrets on ships don't require a system to operate, and therefore if there isn't a sentry system then the outside turrets cant be deactivated. Basically the only upgrades from last game were a new dimension of movement and bosses, but the 3D environment only make a difference when moving around outside the ship, and the bosses were lackluster.

i'm just barely not recommending this. i think the concept is great, i love mecha and power armor and roguelike dungeon crawl FPS games, but this game ends up coming across as kind of generic and soul-less. there's no real sense of 'being in the mech/armor', you have no cockpit and no feet if you look down, and the way that weapons seem to attach to your mech's shoulders instead of being held in robo-hands seems like a lazy cop-out to avoid hand animations. it might as well not be a mech/power armor game at all, it plays just like a bog standard boomer shooter with low gravity. the platforming and movement feel so floaty and weightless as to be almost trivial, zero challenge or sense of skill or speed. you will have more trouble staying on the ground than staying in the air. it ends up making 'on foot' combat completely pointless, becoming a kind of worse Descent clone without a sense of agility and grace to movement and little in the way of environmental reactions like bumping into walls visibly or ledge climbing or anything. just jumping and floating and the least satisfying boost-dash ever. the non-combat 'outside the airlocks' movement is somehow more satisfying than the dungeon interior shooting gameplay through sheer sense of speed and true zero G. the enemy designs are almost kind of interesting being skeleton cyborg monsters instead of just generic robots, but they still come across as having zero personality or interesting behavior/lore/aesthetic. they really are just mindless bone drones. i really want to fight more 'human' enemies piloting their own mech suits in this game. zombies piloting bone mechs or something. but the game's graphics/art style really don't do a concept like the necro-mech skeleton cyborgs justice, there is no blood, no gore, nothing remotely creepy, no sense of body horror whatsoever, the enemies are essentially just flying cow skulls half the time, when they aren't generic robots. this game reminds me of Robo Quest, in that the basic gameplay and core concept is ok, but the overall execution feels like theres a sense of identity and personality missing from the world, it feels like a hollow lifeless video game world, and not in a cool liminal space way. too many hollow low-g dungeon crawls in identical grey corridors shooting identical dog-skull mechs, theres absolutely no interesting changeups of environmental aesthetic, no trees, no ice, no lava level, no sky, no grass, no interesting space clouds, no holographic advertisements, no observation deck windows, no sense of a lived in world, just procedurally generated vaguely cartoony borderlands-without-the-cringe-or-soul cel shaded grey/purple corridors. it doesn't even accomplish the inhuman architecture robo-dungeon vibe with any sense of existentialism or dread or sense of place whatsoever.