Review: Gunstoppable Can’t Outrun Its Own Design

Screenshot: Gunstoppable

I’m playing a game. I know I should be having fun. I love first person shooters. I like fast first person shooters. Even the game thinks I should be having fun: the music is pumping, the bullets are flying. My guns are chugging away (plinking, really) – but I’m just not having any fun. Usually I can find something to love about some of the worst games, but this neon drenched bore fest called Gunstoppable is painful.

I hate writing negative reviews. I don’t program. I’ve dabbled in game design, but not on a professional level and though I’m not a stranger to it, there’s only a few times I put my work out there to be judged by strangers. Sure, I’ve kicked the hornet’s nest with scathing reviews a few times, but even then I temper it with lots of “I don’t wish ill will onto these people.” I feel the same for Gunstoppable, even though it’s so damned hard to find something nice to say. Even the game’s title is such low hanging fruit it should have been reserved for an ability or something rather than the title of the whole freakin’ game.

The Steam store for Gunstoppable is full of screenshots showcasing busy action scenes with a handful of enemy types highlighted in garish colors in a semi-coherent art style. And that’s exactly what you get. But somehow it all looks and feels worse in motion. It’s a truly ugly game.

Screenshot: Gunstoppable

The sound design isn’t much better. In games, guns gain a lot of their meat and heft from the sounds they produce, and Gunstoppable would have been better off substituting in fart noises and loud sighs than the pitiful attempt at Machine Gun Sounds ™ it puts out. The voice acting, on the other hand, is surprisingly not bad–though it’s also not the greatest. But it certainly doesn’t help that the sound editing is also terrible, and the voice over just sounds like audio clips being played over wet meat sounds…I mean, gameplay noises. 

So anyways, I’m playing this game. The music is…pumping. And I’m standing still shooting bullets into a crab that’s doing its best to be a big scary boss by impotently shooting missiles into the ceiling. This Mechwarrior (or Macross) transplant is named Fluffy or something, in an obvious nod to Borderlands, but without mustering even a tiny fraction of the attitude even old and spent Borderlands 4 could put together.

Screenshot: Gunstoppable

When I first started Gunstoppable I thought I was starting a tutorial or an intro level that would ease me into the world and mechanics and then set me out on a more traditional roguelike/rogue-lite type of experience. Nope. Gunstoppable throws you in and you’re moving and shooting from the start. 

Despite my overwhelmingly negative review so far, there are some good things going for Gunstoppable. Gunplay is actually relatively tight, even if the guns themselves feel like you’re shooting air soft rifles. There are only a few guns to choose from, and choosing faster firing guns seems to be better than choosing slower guns (like the rocket launcher). The premise of the game is moving faster makes you do more damage, but it really just seems to increase your fire rate. It could possibly do both but my energy and will to live was so quickly being sapped by playing the game I had to move onto something else.

Gunstoppable also does have roguelite elements with meta progression possible after a run is ended, but that would have required me wanting to play more than the six or seven runs I attempted. I’ve been having far more fun playing the Kex engine port of Doom + Doom II, and those games came out like 30+ years ago. There are just so many better first person shooters to play, and I recommend you go play those instead.