Gunlocked 2

My main problem is the readability of the fights. With all the ♥♥♥♥ on screen you can forget where your ship is, or where enemy bullets are, asteroids, laser ships, upgrades, bomb drones, your own cooldowns. It gets worse when an upgrade screen pops up and stops the action every 10 seconds. The other problem are the useless upgrades: who cares about 5% burn damage, or 0.5 cooldown to a 10 second cast, or 10% increased chance to shock a shielded enemy. You won't be seeing those upgrades again anyway since the pool is littered with all kinds of ♥♥♥♥ you don't care about. The choices don't feel meaningful, or compounding, or empowering, they feel boring. I thought the first game had something going for it and had hopes for the second one. When it just doubled down on the bad, I thought I just needed to wait for some major updates. After a few major updates it's clear to me the dev is just making the game he wants to play. I just don't want to play that game, and that's ok. The music is good.

I liked the original Gunlocked. It was a good game that had a very specific vision and played to its strengths. This sequel... Doesn't? Just like this sequel, the original game had mostly autonomous weapons. Some of them you could aim to some degree, but for the most part everything worked by itself. Because of this a lot of weapons had weird firing patterns such as an area right in front of your ship or a random area on the screen. This is where most of the difficulty came from- balancing the weird firing patterns against a screen full of enemies and obstacles. This sequel ramps up a lot of the weird firing patterns [i]and[/i] makes enemies far faster, far more unpredictable, and just generally obnoxious to play against. Bosses are the worst as they all have some gimmick or off-putting trait like long invulnerability windows; this stretches out combat to the point of frustration... AND, there's an obvious cut in the music where it repeats, which, once you hear it, it really starts to grate on your nerves. Overall, it feels like a step back from the original. The original was tightly focused and just seemed to [i]work[/i], while this one seems like there's a lot of stuff added in that just isn't fun to engage with. There are a lot of keyword stuff here for weapons and it turns choosing upgrades into more of a literacy test with figuring out what means what and how that interacts with what you have. Sometimes it feels like that meme where a guy is holding a butterfly and asking if it's X- like, is this a lock-on weapon? Is this a beacon? I don't know. Interactions aren't exactly clear, which makes the other issues with the game more obvious. For $12, this game is a hard sell when Gunlocked, the original, is less than half that price and altogether a better play. I might recommend this game on a deep sale, but generally it's just not that great.

[h1]Its not a 2. Its 2%[/h1] Gunlocked is simple shmup rougelike with the premise : Your weapons suck and are weird to use. Not terrible in way that you makes you want to throw your prefered control device through a wall. There is no fire button for the good reason that using 4 weapons simultainously with that design principle would not make for fun expierence. It starts out innocent and retro enough but can evolve in some real satisfing mess. Put in some passive, like chance of spliting lasers, bullets explosion on defeated enemies or a drone debuffing... you get the idea. So, the sequel: Increases screen size, simplifies the upgrades structure to mostly passives, adds a dodge state and boosts the visuals somewhat. That's your sequel. Let's go over what broke because of it: Higher screen resolution makes everything smaller. None of the enemies, weapons, etc. are scaled up to accomadate that change. This will result in a microscopic game feel. The stacking passive upgrades are about as unappealing as they get. They come in briefly animated, which is still too long. Their actual icons to identify them are about 16x16, SMALLER than the original game! What do you get? A lot of single digit percentages chances and an absolutely massive trait conditinal system that puts every upgrade into multiple of these: laser, bullets, missile, bomb, sweeping, lock-on, shock, fire, drone, beacon, kinetic... about as enjoyable of a system as checking for allergies. And you will need to reread them because they are THAT unremarkable, on the upgrade screen AND ingame. Dodges state...exists. I dont think this is interesting by itself or used well. It's required at times but is not made appealing at any point. Visuals are an upgrade to like half of console generation, ok cool. However reading anything like health from a glance is impossible. The difference between an highlighted piece of menu and one that is not is just.....again...not readable from a glance. The tiny icons extend to the information of the next level selector, which also leave no impression on you so you also have to read them AGAIN. And here one that really suprised me : The background is too dark! Dark Mode this isn't: The Sprites are BLINDING you! When it eventually turns red because you are on low hp it becomes way more playable. There is only one segmented enemy like a worm. All others are just a singular piece of sprite, even the bosses! This stiltedness does not make for a cool nextgen-ish sequel. Also bosses with poorly conveyed invulnerability phases in what I would categorize a power fanatsy rougelike of a game. Just... NO. You have the entire screen! Put them behind me, to the side, make me build for such situations?! What in the actual ass happend? The first game had some fairly thought out design choices. Not a brilliant game but one I can enjoy. Gunlocked 2 by comparsion is dumb. Looks like some sort of sequel but breaks everything that the original did do well and with nothing new or exciting to fill it in. Forcing my way through it just leaves me bored. Pick the original.

It's more Gunlocked, what else I can say? Bigger game, better graphic, better music, more systems, etc. Metaphorically if Gunlocked was a NES game, this is Super Gunlocked for SNES. It's exactly as it says in the tin, Gunlocked 2: The Gunlockedning.

The game lacks some of the charm and things that made the first one feel fun. I think everything got a bit longer and samey. The upgrades are sort of boring and have way too many levels. There is too much level up for bonuses that feel flat and somewhat disjointed. There's just to much interface clutter with rng manipulation (banish rerolls). Too many levels up interruptions.

I love games with depth. I love games with crazy builds. I love janky chainsaws of fire and I love figuring out how to make my bullets explode into bullets that explode into bombs into bullets (slight exaggeration). This game just delivers and delivers. Nothing is plain, nothing is just pew pew, every pilot and cluster of synergies demands a different kind of thinking and a different kind of moving. This is what it takes to keep me interested enough to sink 100 or so hours each into two games that cost a few bucks each. I loved the original, and I love this more. Wholeheartedly recommend. And I gotta say, I was there for EA on day one, and on day one it felt full and textured and interesting and it's only gotten better since.

A fun vertically scrolling auto-shooter with a variety of starting options and in-run upgrades that synergize with each other.

Interesting take on the roguelite genre, the fusion of genres really blend together well here. Only thing I dislike is that I was kinda expecting more content, but I may just be spoiled by games in the roguelite genre that have gone viral, so the dev could basically afford to work on the game for the next 10 years.

Surprising little hidden gem! Deep and inventive weapon/upgrade synergies. The weapons and powerups tend to change your strategy significantly or encourage different movement. It interweaves action and strategy really well. And the pixel art is nice!

A fun little shmup designed around various forms of automated and triggered weapons, while you focus on your movement and positioning. A good deal of little options, upgrades and combos to stack it all together. Many of these are fun and/or inventive. No control problems on keyboard or controller. Visuals are mostly clean, and the UI is sort-of informative with plenty of cues and clues, albeit with a need to learn what those clues are. That said, like so many contemporaries the mass of shiny things on screen will get a bit cluttered later on - a few weapons or large numbers of drones/beacons can make it hard to see enemies they punch-through but haven't killed. Weak spot is probably the bgm, which gets repetitive after a while.