We’re more than halfway through the year and as you may or may not be aware, 2026’s release schedule is not letting up. Not every game needs to be a 60-hour blockbuster and sometimes we need a quick break from those tentpole releases. Gunboat God might just be one of these types of games for fans of arcade games with twin-stick shooting.
There’s not a whole lot of story to Gunboat God, but the game starts with a cutscene where you are tossed from the ascended citadel and fall to the world below, to land in a gunboat belonging to a crocodile named Yeti. The goal of the game is to fight your way back to the citadel and to take your revenge upon the ruler that tossed you out. Really, the point of this game is to give you 100+ levels in which to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and destroy.
The art style is a mix of colorful parallax scrolling backgrounds that form a striking contrast to the silhouettes of you, the water, and an often endless horde of enemies attacking from above and below. The gunboat can move left or right on the surface of the water and you have the ability to dive below or jump above the surface. As you progress through the game, you’ll earn abilities that will allow you to dash, stay underwater in a submarine, and maneuver with jets in the air. All the while, you can fire in 360 degrees using the right stick. You’ll start off with one weapon, but will unlock a total of 9 weapons as you progress.
Killing enemies fills up your combo and ability meters but will slowly decrease if you are not making contact with enemies. This is important because your combo meter allows you to shoot faster as well as increasing the strength of your jump and dive abilities. Your special ability meter is used to fuel your submarine, jetpack, or your weapon’s overcharge attack.
The game consists of 4 world maps with a mostly linear path that ends in a boss fight. Each node in the world map has its own objective, and some will contain special challenges. Once you complete the node you can progress on to the next node or restart the level in an attempt to do better. Completing nodes will earn you currencies you can use to improve your overall damage, special meter capacity, and different characteristics for each weapon. Completing challenges like using no dashes or shooting only to the left offered on certain levels will earn you another currency used to upgrade your abilities.
Each node on the map has its own set of rules for completing successfully. These rules include objectives like: survive an onslaught of enemies, race from left to right while dodging hazards and killing enemies, stay within a moving safety zone while killing enemies, etc. They all ultimately break down into move fast, don’t lose health, and kill things, but the variety of rules in the nodes helps to keep the gameplay from getting stale. The game difficulty increases steadily and you’ll need to keep up with your upgrades in order to progress. In fact, at one point I needed to respec (there’s no penalty or charge), shifting all of my weapon upgrades to my “best” weapon in order to beat the first boss.
Gunboat God does offer an assisted mode if you are having problems with the normal difficulty, but I didn’t notice a huge difference and the assisted mode prevents your scores from being recorded and also prevents achievements from being earned. On the flip side, if you find the game too easy or have somehow already completed the normal levels, the game includes an unlockable Dread Mode containing harder versions of all the levels. Dread Mode is made a little easier as it allows you to use augments that are unlocked but not usable in the normal mode.
Conclusion
Gunboat God is a fun, challenging arcade game with a twin stick shooting mechanic. It’s not the type of game I imagine most people sitting down and playing from cover to cover. I think that it works best as a game you return to and slowly chip away at by completing new nodes or returning to master older nodes after you’ve upgraded your weapons and abilities.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
