Gungrave for PlayStation 2 was one of the first games I reviewed for Gamereactor magazine in print at the time, along with Need for Speed Underground and Colin McRae 3. I don’t remember that game, other than that I wanted to shoot the whole thing for a while, and the protagonist carried the greatest weapon in video game history throughout.
Gungrave Gore or GORE (for Gunslinger of Resurrection) is the direct sequel to that 2002 adventure in which we dive into the storyline set before the PlayStation factory, where the fate of the world is at stake because The Cuervo Clan, a notorious drug cartel, has created a deadly new drug, SEED, that will devour the soul of anyone who snorts it. drugs are wrong; Keeping your soul is fine, so now it’s up to Grave to kill all members of the Raven clan to eliminate the drug for good. And this is always achieved with shots: shoot everything and fast. The story is as ridiculous as the characters, and while there are bits of gore that allow you to sit back and appreciate that retro nostalgia, the overall experience becomes a stark testament to just how far the action genre has come in the last twenty years has come. I recently played Horizon Forbidden West and now I’m playing God of War: Ragnarök, and going from those titles to Gore is a bit like stepping back in time to 2002.
Gungrave GORE is pathetic in its game systems. It’s rarely about aiming or playing with any sort of precision. No way. Everything here is based on pushing the buttons of the
Watch DualSense and then a semi-automated Grave simultaneously shoot all 32 enemies running across the screen like headless chickens. Iggymob Studios wrote in the game’s press release that it’s basically just about “beat up” and not ducking any of that defensive play or nonsense, and that’s how it goes. For 12 hours as a Grave, I never have to back down, move, dodge enemy attacks, or bother doing anything other than pressing the same button the whole time.
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Gore’s environments are very poorly designed and like its gameplay it feels like it’s straight out of 2002 when the quality standards were much lower and a bit of a cheeky imitation of Devil May Cry as Gungrave gave it. I referred to him as something that’s “okay”. Today? Not so much anymore. Especially after playing the Gungrave Gore level, which has Grave jumping onto a moving train and wreckage and tree branches on the sides of the tracks need to dodge as he shoots every single one of the 2000 stupid enemy soldiers that come out of nowhere and go after him. This is the worst release of the year, the worst level design of 2022 and an example of how old, horrible, drab and especially how boring this game is.
Of course, it’s worth going back, stripping out all the new stuff and just focusing on an intense and frenetic third-person action shooter, but it needs to be done a lot better. Gungrave Gore for PlayStation 5 costs $50, which has to be an early April Fool’s joke in every way. If it had been released for Android for 9 dollars, it would have seemed passable to me.
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