Game Reviews

Gun Commando

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iOS
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Gun Commando
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iOS
| Gun Commando

By calling Gun Commando 'regressive', you could be accused of grossly overestimating just how much the first-person shooter genre has evolved over the years.

Sure, graphics might have changed since Wolfenstein 3D, but the basic idea of corridors and murder hasn't really changed at all. Developers have just got better at hiding us from it.

Not so in the case of Gun Commando.

Here, Green Hill Games does away with any semblance of tact or narrative, dropping you into a maze with a gun, and instructing you to kill.

There's no looking up or down; no jumping; and definitely no regenerating health. This is the FPS as it was imagined at the dawn of time. Rugged, manly, and unwieldy.

Run and gun

In Gun Commando, you play a tousle-haired gun-wielding agent of some law enforcement agency who's tasked with ridding the world of an alien infestation. The bad guys in question look a bit like they've been lifted from a Metroid game, but they'll punch and shoot you all the same.

The game is all pixel graphics and flat textures. There are plenty of crates to grab; health packs to pick up; and enormous bosses to try and take down. So long as you're accurate with your shooting, your gun constantly gets upgraded. This means your firepower improves as the going gets tougher.

You control your agent's movements by sliding a finger around the left of the screen. You control the direction you're looking in by doing the same thing on the right of the screen. By tapping on the left, you can pull off a Duke Nukem-style slide. You fire your gun by tapping on the right.

There's a bluntness to the controls that's common to touchscreen shooters. The lack of precision isn't damning, but it does make some sections of the game even harder than they should be.

Shooty bang bang

Gun Commando is simple and dumb, but its chunky graphics and simple slaughter hark back to a less cynical era of gaming.

If you're after something fresh or innovative, then there's not much here to pique your interest.

But if you yearn for a time when the bad guys were clearly demarcated and your guns and biceps bulged in equal measure, then Gun Commando will suit you just fine.

Gun Commando

There's a lot to like in Gun Commando's retro remodelling of the FPS, but it's hampered somewhat by the clumsy nature of the touchscreen controls
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.