Enter the Gungeon review

I have been looking forward to Enter the Gungeon for a while. Its publisher, Devolver Digital, is behind some of my favourite games, and I’ve poured unhealthy amounts of time into similar titles like The Binding of Isaac over the past few years. I’d even had a brief go at Gungeon at last year’s EGX, where its tongue-in-cheek aesthetic and challenging gameplay made it one of the event’s stand-out indie games.

But when I got hold of the full copy of the game recently, something seemed to be missing.

 Enter the Gungeon is a rogue-like dungeon-crawler, in which the inhabitants of the eponymous Gungeon are living bullets standing in the way of your quest for ‘a gun that can kill the past’. This corny, B-movie-esque starting point makes, unsurprisingly, for a lot of gun-based punnery, especially when it comes to end of level boss fights (my personal favourite remains Meduzi, the Gorgun).

A lot of Gungeon is exactly what you’d expect from a game like this; procedural level generation, bullet-hell style gameplay, gambling-based minigames – it’s clear that this is a game that borrows heavily from what’s come before it. Despite the feeling that you’ve seen this before, however, Gungeon manages its inspiration very effectively, and at no point does it feel like a new aesthetic applied loosely over someone else’s ideas.

My issue with Enter the Gungeon, then, stems not so much from its premise or its gameplay, which are both generally very good, but from its tendency to take away very quickly and give back extremely slowly. For example, as you’d expect, you lose health when you get shot; but while similar games are quick to give back, especially in the early stages, health drops are relatively rare in Gungeon.

it’s clear that this is a game that borrows heavily from what’s come before it

In terms of weaponry, every available character starts out with similar firepower, but with opportunities to pick up new weapons often limited to two a level, assuming you’re lucky enough to have everything you need to find them, early levels can get dull quickly. These early stages of the game, which aren’t challenging enough to be particularly interesting or consistently rewarding enough to get you through to later stages, feel more like a grind than part of the game in their own right. Even if you do stumble across a new gun (random resource drops are very rare, so you only tend to get new weapons by buying them or using up resources), there’s every possibility it’ll be completely useless. While some of the more imaginative guns grant you laser beams or the ability to slow your enemies, others, such as the lowly crossbow, feel more like a downgrade of your original weapon than anything else.

This dissatisfaction is a real shame, because Gungeon genuinely develops strongly as it progresses. Coming across new bosses or guns, or finding random NPC events are all exciting ways to change up the game. More often than not, however, if you’ve gotten far enough into the game to find something new, you’ve managed it by the skin of your teeth, and the game experience ends up feeling stunted at a time when it should be expanding to help you get the most out of its content.

 Obviously, rogue-like, bullet-hell games like this are supposed to present a significant challenge, but the harsh punishment that Enter the Gungeon dishes out detracts from its positives.

A huge amount of imagination has gone into this game; the level of detail is stunning, and the ways in which both you and the AI can interact with the Gungeon is particularly impressive. Flipping a table to provide cover, and then dodge-rolling past a hail of bullets before picking off your advancing enemies is intensely satisfying when pulled off correctly. But while everything about Enter the Gungeon seems to have been done extremely well, I’m just not convinced it’s been done quite right.

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