izigame.me

I think its fitting that my 100th Steam review is not only an indie game, but a Devolver published indie game, because Enter the Gungeon was my FIRST indie game, and the one that made me fall in love with indies in general.
The first thing I said when I booted up Gunbrella on stream and shot the gun for the first time was, "Hey thats kinda like Gungeon".
Most of this game is nothing like Gungeon, but as with most games that Devolver chooses to publish, there's a certain something about them that exudes this consistent feeling that the game knows what it wants to be and reaches for it.
Gunbrella is great, lets get that out of the way. For 15 bucks you can't really complain about much. Its stylish, the sound design is going to be one of those that goes under the radar come GOTY time, but damn if this game doesn't sound f*cking amazing. Every little bleep and bloop, sound effects, trills to let you know things are happening like saves and quests popping up, it all fits so well with the theme here. The music is also fantastic, but as an aside, there were some portions of the endgame that I think lacked music not for atmosphere, but because the script wasn't working properly and the music just wasn't playing. Audio bugs were the only thing I encountered the whole game though, so props for releasing a game thats... well, finished? lol
I saw a review call this game "Celeste with guns" and honestly, thats not a bad description. The movement is very clean, with great precision but just the right amount of floatiness to balance between too stiff and too floaty. Its the third bowl of porridge, just right.
The combat overall feels pretty great, especially when you really get a good clear of a room going and pop the shotgun at the perfect time to get full damage and one hit kills all the way through, but as far as the combat goes, I do have a few criticisms.
First and foremost, I did not feel the need or even incentive to use other ammunition types until quite literally the very end of the game. There were opportunities that it could have been fine, but it never felt like I'd be gaining a huge advantage over the base shotgun. More often than not, too, I opted to just keep the shotgun out for familiarity's sake. Why switch up the rhythm of how I play when its still working?
Enemies were fun to engage with mostly, but they did feel fairly sparse until the very end of the game. The level design was fun (especially some platforming gauntlets) but on the normal difficulty, which is typically the best balanced in most games, I felt as though the difficulty curve never really had that uptick. There were parts that I died, but it was mostly due to my own impatience, and some of the later bosses and just bosses in general were pretty lackluster. Thats not to say they arent visually engaging, they all look great, but mechanically speaking the second to last boss even was just kinda underwhelming.
Thankfully, that doesn't matter all that much, because the other elements of Gunbrella really tie everything together very solidly despite the noteable dip in quality in the last hour or two.
The sound design is phenomenal like I mentioned, graphically speaking the pixel art is great and its very stylistically cohesive which is tough to pull off. I wasn't expecting as much eldritch theming as there was, but it didn't feel out of place. The story is basic and predictable, but held together by a charming cast of characters. The dialogue was pretty genuinely funny sometimes and that goes a long way for keeping players moving along. There were definitely some lull points where the dialogue was a bit too wordy at points, and frankly the ending of the game made f*ckall sense. I think I got the bad ending and I have an idea as to how to get the good ending but regardless of the very final moment of the game, there was a lot of "I guess that's how that worked out" moments that left myself and the people watching me scratching our heads a little bit.
Again, this game is great though. I realize that I'm criticizing it a lot in this review, but thats mostly because there's an almost intangible joy to playing something like this. I really liked how zipping around the levels at 100mph shotgun at the ready was a valid playstyle, and I enjoyed the second half twist. I thought I was nearing the end of the game about 3 hours in, but there's a fun realization that you are going to see the very direct future consequences of your prior actions in game and that was great.
Despite the lack of a real difficulty bump or mechanical test of skill towards the end of the game, the most important takeaway for Gunbrella is that from opening to closing credits, it was very *fun*. I think that gets missed in a lot of reviews, because I can nitpick and put every game under a microscope until there's nothing left, but at the end of the day all that really matters is if a game delivers on the fun factor, and Gunbrella's whole deal is ensuring that your gun/umbrella stays entertaining from start to finish.
Thanks for reading, follow my curator page for more indie reviews like this one (a little more coherent usually lol its very late for me).
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42143664/