Game Reviews

Gun Bros

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Gun Bros
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Guns are like brothers. They’re handy to have around in a tough situation, can sometimes prove volatile, and not everybody has one.

Gun Bros, unsurprisingly, includes both brothers and guns. Yet no matter how unreliable your brother or 9mm pistol might be, it will still be ten times more reliable than the rejigged controls of Gun Bros for the Xperia Play.

Bros before foes

There’s a familiar feeling from the word go. Gun Bros is a twin-stick shooter in which you fight increasingly numerous and difficult waves of alien enemies as a butch and well-armed military commando. Unfortunately, thanks to sluggish movement, unresponsive controls, and aggravating menus, Gun Bros can’t quite surpass its simpler or slicker contemporaries like Pew Pew 2 or Age of Zombies.

It looks very nice, at least. Your muscled hero waddles around the map turning everything a darker shade of red in a very satisfying visual style. This doesn’t forgive the aforementioned control woes, mind.

The touchpads serve as the sticks for movement and firing, but annoyingly both sticks can act up at any time (usually following one of the games many pop-up windows), causing you to stand there helplessly as baddies descend on you. There is the option to put away the Xperia Play’s controls completely, though that sort of negates the point of having physical buttons in the first place. The multiplayer allows you to team up with a human bro, which is much better than relying on your somewhat dimwitted AI cohort. Finding someone to play with, however, is often a challenge in itself.

Act of grindness

To its credit, the game has a very deep (or at least very extensive) shop system. By collecting ‘Explodium’ as you fight, you can earn gold coins by simply refining this mineral after each struggle.

The shop is packed with machine guns, shotguns, twin pistols, grenades, and other weapons, not to mention armour and further useful add-ons for your soldier. Being a freemium title, the game also allows you to purchase even more powerful and exclusive weapons for real cash (converted into in-game dollars called War Bucks).

These RPG elements are complemented by stat-boosting experience points, which you can share out among your attributes to raise your speed, attack, and defence.

Sadly, none of these efforts to keep you hooked compensates for the slowness of your characters and the grind you will eventually feel after sitting through wave after wave of enemies just to get a shiny new pistol that does exactly the same thing as the one you had before.

Gun Bros is that much older brother you haven’t seen in a while. He may be a good sibling at heart, but don't be surprised if you share little in common.

Gun Bros

A visually shiny shooter with a helluva lot of content thrown in. It’s just a pity you have to grind so much to see any of it
Score
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan is a boy. Specifically, a boy who plays games. More specifically, a nice boy who plays many games. He often feels he should be doing something else. That's when the siren call of an indie gem haunts him. Who shall win this battle of wills? Answer: not Brendan.