[Review] Gunfire Reborn

Are you on the lookout for a lootin’, shootin’ roguelite game to sink a few dozen hours into? If so, you could do a lot worse than Gunfire Reborn, an FPS with a variety of animal characters to control and tons of loot to collect.

You’ll start out with access to only one playable character: a ginger cat in a wide-brimmed hat that strongly reminded me of puss-in-boots. This feisty feline has access to some handy smoke grenades and a secondary ability that locks enemies in place for a few seconds. After a few hours of play, you’ll unlock a dog with the ability to wield two weapons at once, and a bird who excels at melee combat, among others.

If you’ve played a roguelite before, you’ll know what to expect. There are no complicated objectives; instead, you’ll move between small rooms and larger arenas, shooting everything that moves and only progressing when all the enemies in a given area have exploded in a shower of loot. Some foes will drop guns that you can pick up, but you can only carry two at a time, so you have to be selective, making quick decisions on the fly. At the end of each area, you are rewarded with chests containing scrolls and ascension perks that grant powerful bonuses.

The story is about as bare-bones as you could imagine. After a brief introductory fight, a panda innkeeper called Uncle Bao warns the Crown Prince (the previously mentioned cat) that there is a demonic aura infesting ‘Longling Tomb’, the game’s first area. The Crown Prince says he has come to deal with it. At least, I think that’s what he means to say. What he actually says is: ‘I’m totally irreconcilable with the demonic aura! I won’t give up since I have found the clues with such effort I have put in!’ As you see, the English translation leaves a lot to be desired.

After this brief exchange, there is no more dialogue until the very end of the game, and only brief cutscenes to introduce the bosses. Even the vendor characters that show up within levels have no dialogue or flavour text to go with them. I’d have appreciated a more developed story to give some context to the action, but at least I didn’t have to endure any more badly translated dialogue.

The weaponry on offer is one of the most consistently fun parts of Gunfire Reborn. For the first five or six hours, you’ll be showered with new and exciting guns to use. After that, the flow of new weapons slows to a trickle, but you’ll still discover new weaponry even late into the game. Fitting into familiar archetypes, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and so on, they are designed in such a way that every new item feels unique and fun to use.

There’s a launcher, for example, that spews mini black holes that suck in nearby enemies. There are a few different types of throwable blades that bounce off the walls and cause exquisite chaos wherever they go. A personal favourite of mine were the ice spears, which remain stuck in the level after being thrown and can be drawn back to your hand with a satisfying thunk, skewering any enemies unlucky enough to be in the way. Some weapons have useful alt-fire modes, such as a lightning rifle, which can create a blue circle through which you can shoot enemies for enhanced damage.

Each weapon comes with different inscriptions and in some cases, elemental damage, so they are all unique. The scrolls and ascension perks are relatively easy to understand, but add a much-needed layer of strategy to the shooting. Ascensions are unique to the character you are playing, and significantly boost the amount of damage you can dish out with your guns and secondary skills. It goes without saying that carefully selecting ascensions, scrolls, and guns with inscriptions that compliment one another is essential for a successful run. You’ll collect two types of currency as you play, one which you can spend during a run to upgrade your guns or buy new ones, and another which can only be spent at the end of a run to unlock permanent upgrades such as increased health and damage, making subsequent playthroughs easier.

Although the guns are undeniably fun to use, the movement felt really sluggish to me. It’s possible I’ve been spoiled recently by Roboquest, a similar roguelite FPS with quick movement and kinetic gunplay, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was wading through treacle the whole time. It doesn’t help that the ginger cat you start out with is one of the slowest characters in the game, but even after I began using other characters, I still felt they were on the slow side. The trouble is, the game feels like it should have fast movement. There’s no aiming down sights, so, outside a couple of specific weapon types, you’re always shooting from the hip. Enemies, including most bosses, make frequent use of area-of-effect attacks that punish you for lingering too long in the same place. You can jump and dash, but there’s minimal choice when it comes to fancy movement options.

The levels themselves don’t have a lot of verticality and the same simple layouts are repeated a lot. There are optional side tombs called vaults that contain more difficult challenges and powerful loot, but these are not particularly hidden and in general I found almost no secrets or hidden areas in the game that warranted exploration. It’s possible I just wasn’t observant enough, but more often than not when I went exploring, I bumped into invisible walls. Like the barebones story, the lack of secret areas or reasons to go exploring isn’t a major problem, but after a while it did create a feeling of monotony as I blasted through the same predictable areas again and again.

The game uses a cell-shaded graphics style that looks pleasant enough but contributes to levels that lack visual detail. After the first hour or so in a new act—there are three core acts in the game, plus an optional fourth—you’ll have seen everything the environments have to offer, and what is there isn’t very interesting. At times, especially in the second act, it can look like a remastered N64 game, with blocky shapes and not much fine detail in the environments. To be fair, the visual design of the guns is rather creative, and some of the effects that pop off when firing them look neat.

The sound design also feels rather muted, and the soundtrack is so low-key that I sometimes forgot there was music playing at all. The music does pick up appropriately during boss fights, but don’t expect to be humming any memorable tunes after switching off the game.

Due to the bland environments, sluggish movement, and lack of a story, my first few hours with the game were a bit rough. But I started to have fun once I dug deeper into the roguelite elements of the game. Anyone who has played a roguelite or roguelike game in recent years will know the excitement of having a run suddenly take off due to a potent combination of synergistic upgrades that reward a specific playstyle. If that’s the feeling you crave, you’ll certainly find it here.

In my first half dozen hours with the game, I got a decent way into the second act before repeatedly hitting a brick wall. I simply wasn’t dishing out enough damage and found myself regularly overwhelmed by enemies. This ended up being a good thing, as it forced me to properly think about the ascensions I was choosing and how well they complimented my chosen weapons. It was at this point that I grasped how important elemental damage was and how I’d need to make use of it if I wanted to beat the game.

Elemental damage comes in three flavours: fire, lightning, and corrosion. Some guns always have a percentage chance of applying a specific elemental damage, others only occasionally do, and each type has a different effect. Corrosion, for example, slows enemies down. Certain enemies have (blue) shields or (yellow) armour, in addition to their (red) health bars. Lightning damage is especially powerful against shields, corrosion works best against armour, while fire damage rips through red health bars.

The real fireworks happen when you inflict more than one type of elemental damage on an opponent, stacking two or more for added effects. The ginger cat can do this by combining a lightning or fire weapon with the corrosive damage from his smoke grenades. The dog can do it by making use of his rather excellent ability to dual-wield guns for a short time. Combining corrosion and lightning damage creates a new type of elemental damage called miasma. These and other elemental combos are a reliable way to generate some seriously tasty damage and take down some of the toughest enemies the game throws at you.

Once I understood this, my runs became more successful and the whole experience was a lot  more enjoyable. However, I think the game could do a better job of communicating these systems to the player. There are gameplay tips displayed on loading screens, but these are fleeting, and to get along better with the games systems I had to search online to get a proper understanding of how elemental damage worked. Which is fine, but I would have liked to have seen clearer information provided in-game. While there is a tutorial, it’s quite basic.

This understanding of elemental damage eventually got me through the second and third acts, although I still died many times on the way there. As mentioned previously, the chest at the end of each level gives you a choice of three ascension perks, and the randomness of this system means that some runs fall apart simply because you didn’t get the ascensions you needed to reliably progress. Such is the nature of the roguelite genre. Its inherently unpredictable design rewards you with a new experience every time you restart, but also forces you to adapt your approach based on the endlessly new upgrades you find.

Death often comes quickly and unexpectedly. Even low-level grunts are able to end you in a matter of seconds. It’s definitely one of those experiences where you have to embrace death and be willing to try new things when you start over. Although it takes some time to unlock the alternative characters, when you do manage to, this opens the door to different tactics and new play styles. I spent a few enjoyable runs using the bird character, who can kick enemies in the face, excelling at close combat, and restricting myself to using only melee weapons like swords. In total, there are eight playable characters in the Xbox version I tested, although I was disappointed to discover that the Steam version of the game contains four additional characters released as part of DLC packs that are inaccessible to console players. Perhaps these missing characters will be released on console at some stage, but for now it’s a shame to see console players being neglected compared to their PC counterparts.

I was on the fence with Gunfire Reborn during my first few hours of play, but the more time I spent with it, the more characters I unlocked and mechanics I explored, the more enjoyment I found. Although I didn’t sink hundreds of hours into it, I can totally understand why some players have. If you prefer twitchy combat that rewards moment-to-moment skill you might find the game a bit sluggish, but if you love creating a monstrously overpowered build using a carefully chosen selection of weapons and upgrades, it’s possible you’ll be sucked into Gunfire Reborn’s addictive grind for hours on end.