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Gunlord X Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Gunlord X
• Developer: NG Dev Team
• Publisher: Eastasiasoft
• PS4, Switch

NG Dev seem set on single handedly changing my mind about the Euroshooter. Born of the European PC scene, the genre is notorious for tossing away all the arcade conventions that STG fanatics appreciate, instead rooting itself in the demoscene mentality and using the shooter as a medium to flex their technical prowess and deliver overwhelming sights and sounds. 

Gunlord X inherits every one of these problems. Touchy, ambiguous, and honestly a bit sloppy at points, Gunlord X carries all the hallmarks of the European PC shooter, despite its origins as a posthumous Dreamcast and Neo Geo game. In spite of that, it remains enjoyable throughout, making a case for a more relaxed take on the genre.

Gunlord’s basic structure will be familiar to anyone who’s played a Turrican title, with short detours into more traditional scrolling shooter stages. Areas are large and open, with several nooks and hallways to explore on your way to the goal. Its goal isn’t to create a non-linear space, but instead give each contained area a wider sense of scale. Areas stretch both vertically and horizontally, often folding into each other or snaking beneath previous spaces, occasionally hinting at what’s on the other side. 

To go along with these larger spaces comes an arsenal that lets you travel fast and fill the area full of bullets. A wheel mode drops you into an morphball-esque form that lets you plaster the floor with bombs, and your guns frequently cover half the screen or ricochet through corridors, taking down anything you’re vaguely aiming at. The only weapon that needs anything close to precision is your high powered alternative beam weapon, but I rarely needed it for anything other than bosses, which crowd so much of the screen it’s hard not to hit them.

Damage comes to you as easily as you deal it. Separation between the foreground and background is often ambiguous, hitboxes are wide and damage feedback is weak. Combined with the oversaturated visuals I often never noticed I’d been taking hits until I’d lost my final hit point and detonated. 

The first scrolling shooter stage provides the perfect illustration for this. Large battleships flank the sides of the stage, which you’re free to fly right over. Naturally, I assumed this meant that I’d only take damage from their weapon fire, since there was no collision with the ships themselves. It was only when I noticed the quiet flashing preceding my ship’s explosion that it became clear that I was in fact, taking damage from flying over them. 

Gunlord is full of these weird collisions and eccentricities. Stages objects have weirdly precise collision boxes, making it easy to get caught on them as you try to jump onto or descend from them, introducing a stuttering pace to navigation instead of a smooth flow. 

Jumping itself is off–gravity is abrupt and heavy and wheel mode doesn’t preserve any momentum, dropping you straight to the floor when you transform and making your jump arc even smaller. It can even be difficult to determine what you can jump on. Steppable platforms often appear to be background objects, and the visual design of certain platforms had me expecting them to move when I boarded, but instead ended up being static, while other seemingly static platforms abruptly started. 

And despite every one of these problems Gunlord X manages to still be enjoyable. Levels never demand any serious precision, which keeps the fiddly controls from being a problem. Hitboxes may be vague and damage feedback weak, but it’s mitigated by enemy patterns that are so indirect and linear that you can avoid them if you stand slightly out of position and point your massive cone of fire vaguely in their direction. 

Gunlord X isn’t about surgical precision. It’s about big, expressive spaces, massive bosses, and giving you absurd levels of firepower to pelt them with. Gunlord is just difficult enough to make you pay attention, and forgiving enough that death rarely feels like it matters. Playing careful and clean is a fool’s errand. Fast and loose is the philosophy here. These spaces are made for you to run over. Once I gave up on that little voice seeking perfect play, Gunlord X finally made sense, and I found enjoyment in the simple act of shooting it all down.