REVIEW

Enter the Gungeon Review

by Sam Foxall, April 4th, 2016

I’m mowing down hordes of cute, walking bullets with a gun that fires junk mail, while a turtle in a space helmet provides covering fire as I frantically roll from upturned table to stone pillar. I’ve only got a few seconds before the next torrent of bullets destroys my last bit of cover and I’ve got to face the wave of smiling artillery without getting hit by a single shot or else it’s back to the start with me. These moments of pure lunacy happen at least three times a level while playing Enter the Gungeon, a bullet hell dungeon crawler from Dodge Roll Games which sees Gungeoneers flipping and dodging through thousands of multi-coloured bullets to find a Gun which can kill the Past. The constant drip of bonkers weaponry, challenging enemies and massive bosses makes for one of the best roguelikes in recent memory, one which will have you mashing the Quick Restart button every time you die.

The story in Enter the Gungeon is quite minimal, following the trials of four adventurers who are seeking a way to literally kill the Past and start over again. When your main plot thread is the quest to find a gun that is supposed to slay Time, you can tell that Enter the Gungeon is not taking itself too seriously. It is a game which revels in its silliness, via the hundreds of ridiculous guns or its obsession with making as many puns or references as possible without breaking game flow. Upon arriving at the Gungeon and entering the Breach, which can be seen as a sort of Firelink Shrine for gun-nuts, it’s your goal to delve deeper into the Gungeon, discovering more weapons, freeing fellow travellers from the depths and eventually trying to attain the fabled time-killing gun. The Firelink Shrine comparison is not just me trying to reference Dark Souls yet again, the chaps at Dodge Roll have taken a clear inspiration from From Software’s RPG, right down to the name of their studio. You slowly populate the Breach with more people you’ve found on your travels, ranging from shopkeepers, to hunters of Bullet-kin to even a sad, helmeted explorer whose helmet you can keep kicking into the depths for them to go collect. Every new NPC injects more life into the Gungeon, as makeshift shops and tents are set up to house the growing settlement of ne’er do wells who all seek the treasures of the Gungeon. Other roguelikes like The Binding of Isaac do this kind of meta-progression of unlocking new levels and items behind walls of text while Enter the Gungeon turns its hub into a living space which grows along with your skills as a Gungeon crawler. A new shopkeeper could mean a powerful new item in the item pool, which means you could clear that tricky boss to get to the next floor and so on. The feedback loop while playing Enter the Gungeon is precisely designed to always give you a new weapon to collect or a potential NPC to find for when you go back into the depths of the labyrinth.

The Dark Souls comparison stretches to Gungeon’s item descriptions, with each weapon and upgrade having its own little history and flavour text which either points to a larger universe outside of the crypt or is just there to make you laugh. Rather than just parroting back a typical Soulesian trope, the addition of humour adds so much personality to Gungeon, be it through the hundreds of little sight gags and references peppered throughout the in-game encyclopaedia or the deliberate parody descriptions which reference items found in the Souls series. The humour is just right, as it never becomes distracting or in your face by constantly reminding you that it made a reference to something else, but it is pitched well enough that you’ll get a decent chuckle after finding a weapon like the Wind Up Gun which plays ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ whenever you reload it. The light-heartedness of Enter the Gungeon goes a long way, especially when the game itself is rock hard. You’ll appreciate a brief moment of levity when you’re about to fight a giant cannonball ghost which shoots enough projectiles to turn the screen red with cannon fire.

The Breach will become your home away from home, filled with all sorts of odd yet charming characters.

While the number of projectiles and enemies on screen can become quite overwhelming, Gungeon’s controls are intuitive and you will be ducking and weaving between bullets in no time. It’s best played on a controller, where you aim and move like a twin stick shooter, with dodge roll mapped to the left bumper and shoot to the right. You can fully remap your controls if you wish but the default layout does the job and I never had cause to switch, besides mapping the Blank Fire command to clicking in one stick rather than two. Besides rolling and shooting, you can use an item with the right trigger or fire off a Blank by clicking in both sticks, clearing the entire room of enemy projectiles for a short time. This limited ability to give yourself some breathing room is vital, allowing you to essentially hit a panic button and reset the screen back to normal before the bulletstorm begins again. Items can range from calling in an ammo drop to resupply your current weapon or drinking a potion which makes you invincible for a short while. These items are as varied as the guns, with there being a healthy mix of passive and active items which you gain from chests or buy from shopkeepers within the Gungeon depths. Each Gungeoneer has their own unique starting equipment, with the Marine having his stalwart pistol and increased reload speed while the Convict has her trusty sawed-off shotgun and Molotov cocktail to throw on command. Each one of the four lend themselves to a certain initial playstyle but as you go deeper, you’ll fashion your own way for rolling and shooting, depending on the weapons and items you find along the way. Unlike The Binding of Isaac, there are no ‘game-winning’ items which almost guarantee a successful run when picked up. Sure, there is some amazing weaponry but you have to run out of ammo eventually, leaving you with the tricky decision of keeping that BFG replica and hoping for more ammo or selling it to buy that rifle which turns people into chickens.

There are two separate currencies in Enter The Gungeon, bullet casings which can be used within the Gungeon to buy items and weapons as well as special Credits, which are gained from beating bosses and completing special tasks for NPCs. Collecting Credits and cashing them in at shops in the Breach is what widens the item pool, meaning bigger and crazier guns to find during your travels. You’ll become attached to these vendors, checking on their stock every time you return to the surface to see if you can now buy that brand new Freeze Ray or discovering that the orc you found hanging out in the mines is now selling military hardware out of the back of his truck.

Be prepared to return to the Breach a lot though, as Enter the Gungeon will beat you into submission for the first few runs. You’ll have to quickly adapt to the invincibility on your dodge roll, while also juggling how much ammo you have in each gun, when to use Blanks and when to spend your keys to unlock chests or whether to save them for a later date. The first area is fairly easy, with the first boss giving you your first taste of the madness to come but by the time the second boss comes round, Gungeon really starts to throw some heavy punches. There are five areas in total, with some secret levels that players can unlock here and there, as well as a super hard character boss for each of the four Gungeoneers. This may sound like it is fairly short but I’ve been playing for roughly 40 hours and I’ve reached the fifth and final area once. Like Isaac and Nuclear Throne, getting better at Enter the Gungeon requires learning enemy patterns and being able to keep dodging waves of projectiles even when you’re on your last heart and you’ve only got 20 shots left in that sweet Dark Matter gun when going into the area boss. However, it’s rare that you feel cheated out of a run as there aren’t problems of ‘troll/death rooms’ which you’d find in Isaac and if you did get hit by an errant projectile, it’s probably because you mistimed your dodge and ended up coming out of the roll at the wrong time. Even when you do lose, there is always a new item to unlock or a new NPC to meet back at the Breach so you never feel like you’ve wasted a run.

When you’re fighting the later bosses, it’ll become muscle memory to hit the dodge roll at every opportunity.

You’ll want to keep going back as the enemies and bosses are so well designed, both visually and gameplay wise. Every enemy has its own unique, animated tell for when they are about to fire, like the Gun Knight’s flashing eyes before it swings its sword, so players can always prepare for attacks and have their dodge roll at the ready. Each enemy drips with personality, be it the Bullet-Kin’s goofy little waddle as they walk towards you or the manic dash of the Bullet Pope as he charges at you during the fight with his King. Like with the various item descriptions, Enter the Gungeon doesn’t miss a moment to make you smile which makes the otherwise soul-crushing difficulty more manageable. While enemies do become more menacing and powerful as you delve into the ancient chambers of the Gungeon, Dodge Roll’s silliness is ever-present to remind you that you should be having fun playing their game, rather than kicking you when you’re down.

There are so many little touches which add to Enter the Gungeon’s charm, like the clock spinning backwards and showing you the length of each run upon every death or the little animation quirks that you can see whenever you reload your gun. The only letdown in the presentation department is the music, which all blends together into a fairly samey synth heavy soundtrack. It’s not bad by any means but there are no tracks you’ll be humming to yourself after a serious session of Gungeon and more often than not, I turned the music off and played something from a John Woo movie in the background as it seemed more appropriate for the action on screen. Nevertheless, there is nothing out of place in Enter the Gungeon, as everything is designed to either make you smirk or look super cool, even when you are being shot to pieces by a gargantuan blob monster with a perpetual smile on its face.

For me, Enter the Gungeon is an absolute cracker. Its perfect blend of tongue-in-cheek humour, brutal but fair combat and satisfying meta-progression makes for a game which earns its rightful place on the roguelike pantheon. Expect to lose hundreds of hours into this game, flipping tables and shooting rocket-guided bees at hordes of enemies. It’s now my go-to game whenever I have 20 minutes to kill and I just want to have a great time. It also allows you to shoot glitter at skeletons that shoots lasers from their eyes. Isn’t that just something you want to play right now?