Review: Gunpoint (PC)

I straight up bought Gunpoint on the strength of its free demo, and ultimately ended up feeling about it more or less the same way I felt about Anodyne: it was just about enough fun for the money, though I wouldn't have minded if the base experience had had a little more meat on its bones.

Gunpoint sort of reminded me of Stealth Bastard, only more fun. Whereas Stealth Bastard made me feel more or less like I was playing Super Mario Bros. with shadows and a stealth meter, Gunpoint actually made me feel like I was a superspy with super abilities, dodging (mostly) bumbling idiots.

Pictured: Stealth Bastard

The fun of the game comes from finding new and different (and, optionally, increasing violent and hilarious) ways to avoid and/or destroy security guards. Normally, I don't link to trailers because it seems extra-lazy, but in this case I think this video does a great job of showing what the gameplay's all about:

The other great thing about the game is its humor. It was written and in large part created by Tom Francis, whose work in game journalism I've always enjoyed, and the game itself shows off the self-awareness that comes from someone who picks on other people's games for a living. Fourth-wall-breaking abounds, tooltips are hilarious, and the branching-tree dialogues that follow the completion of each mission provide choices that are, for once, not boring, stilted, and canned-seeming, but are instead clever, amusing, and surprising all in turn.

The game lasted me about 4-5 hours, all told (I think), and I came away feeling like I got my money's worth. It was one of those games that I thoroughly enjoyed but in retrospect think of as being repetitive and as much as I'm wired to always want more content, I think if Gunpoint had continued on in the same vein for a few more hours, I might have quit out of boredom before I reached the end. Basically, it's just as long as it should be.

And I guess, oddly enough, that's my complaint. For such a "lite"-type game, the art style is attractive, the music fits, the dialogue is interesting and the story is actually pretty multilayered and engaging. The aesthetic is pretty much perfectly tweaked. The controls are tight, and the game mechanics are clever, if a bit bare. It just sort of seems like Francis could have done even more with the game. It's such a damn good game, in a design sense, that it's almost frustrating to not see more done with what's there. When the game starts, it has a feel to it that's similar to World of Goo or Blocks That Matter, or one of those other games that slowly, excellently teach you skill after skill until you've mastered, but then it turns out that there's really only 2 or 3 skills to master and the rest of the game just asks you to use those skills over and over again, and that's it.

That probably makes it sound like I didn't like the game. But I did, very much. I'm just surprised whenever I play a game like this that's absolutely satisfying as-is, but feels like the groundwork is already laid for something even better. Then that something better never comes, and it's weird to be happy with what you've got while also wishing it could have been more.

Anyway, that's a super-vague sort of review, but I'm hungry and I'm going to go eat now.