It’s rare that I find myself in a situation in which I want to fully hate on a game yet love it at quite the same time. I’ve spent numerous hours now with Gunkid 99 though, and that is exactly how I am feeling about each and every minute I play it. Some things within the game feel almost perfect for a platformer, but the patience required to see those perfect moments will be had by very few gamers that dare to jump into Gunkid 99.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about yet, then you will probably have been as unaware of the arrival of Gunkid 99 as I was. If however, after this review you wish to challenge yourself, all I want to say is good luck.
Developed by Yongjustyong, Gunkid 99 is a frantic, yet simplistic platformer in appearance with gameplay taking place across numerous stages of a 2D arena-based play area. Within each stage, your main task will be running, jumping, collecting, and shooting with your stick figure protagonist until you complete the level. It all sounds pretty simple when you say it like that but believe me when I say this may be the hardest game that I have played this year, maybe even in the last two years.
Gameplay begins with a brief tutorial that shows the basics of movement, including a wall-jump, double-jump, a roll that grants brief temporary invincibility, as well as how to use weapons and so on. From here you’re thrust into the thick of it with 5 Worlds to complete, and 7 levels within each, or at least I believe there are. I have sadly yet to get to the end. Let me tell you why.
To complete each stage you must collect weapons, all of which are various guns from shotguns and pistols to laser weapons and so on. Each level has a set number of weapons that need to be collected and your progress of how many you have is stored in the top left of the screen, whilst the number still needed sits underneath each pickup.
Now as said before, each stage is played out in a 2D arena-based area, with the whole thing traversable in maybe 5 seconds if you have the speed, reactions, and know-how. The controls are super simple, just as you always need for any hardcore platformer, and utilising them with things such as your dodge-roll and wall-jump, you must make your way around each of the platforms in any given stage, collecting each weapon that spawns before it expires resulting in a game over. Whilst you run about collecting weapons, enemies will continuously spawn causing difficulty in obtaining each one, and the longer you leave an enemy on a stage before taking it out, the harder your stage becomes, quickly turning into a bullet hell massacre if you aren’t quick enough to eliminate them.
If you manage to do all of the above, you’ll clear your stage and after a stage has been cleared, you can play it again to obtain a higher score which is needed to unlock more stages and worlds, pretty basic stuff. The problem here is that even after completing all 7 stages on World 1, which is no easy task in itself, you’ll need to go back and rack almost double the score you’ve already attained across the levels to unlock World 2, with the same pattern repeating as you push through each world. What’s more, is points are only earned from weapons collected with enemies killed doing nothing but provide the occasional coin drop and make your chances a little easier for a moment.
The reason this is so difficult boils down to the frequency of enemy spawns, and whilst the very early stages will cause few problems should you kill enemies the moment they spawn, later levels spawn enemies almost twice as fast as you can eliminate things on screen, meaning it’s only a matter of time before you are needing to dodge bullets, trying to kill the enemies with the most awkward damage output and struggling to make it to a new weapon drop before it expires.
Replaying a cleared level serves to increase your score and once you get to this stage, you’ll no longer be given a set target of weapons to pick up, but rather a counter to see how many you can pick up, turning things into a more survival-based game mode by trying to collect as many guns as you can before becoming overwhelmed with you’re overall score being tied to however many you can muster.
Now the frustration for all of this comes down to the game possibly being a near-perfect design in many ways meaning you only really have yourself to blame for your shortcomings. The controls are fluid, incredibly responsive and simplistic, the objective is clear and simple, and the only things that really change is enemy placement, the weapon you are using – which will always be the last one you picked up, and the stage you are playing on, yet even with such simple mechanics, this game has one of the hardest difficult spikes we’ve seen since Dark Souls.
When replaying a level, you can play in Normal mode which allows any weapon that has been unlocked to be spawned and used, whilst Equipped Mode is an additional mode that has players limited to just the weapons that are equipped within their current loadout from the main menu.
Your loadout is certainly a focal point too as not only will you be able to equip weapons, but you’ll also want to spend the coins you’ve been collecting from defeated enemies to buy and equip different perks for use as you go along, which is vital to progression and without them you really won’t stand a chance.
Perks available include things such as a coin magnet to pull dropped coins towards you, extra lives, damage boosts, double ammo, shields and more and whilst once more very basic. They all provide a valuable feature when you are in a barrage of incoming enemy fire.
Whilst the game handles incredibly well and you can make split-second movements as and when needed, the difficulty curve is so steep that even after several hours I still found myself pushing towards only the second world, and despite being one of many now on the leaderboards for each level, it seems only one person so far has even managed to pass the first world at all.
Sadly there is also one major issue plaguing the game currently that I felt truly infuriated after the fourth occurrence, and that is that freezing issues currently ongoing with Gunkid 99 and the fact that on the few occasions I finally managed to pull together a run that would eclipse one of my high scores, and notably the ones needed to progress to the next world entirely, the game would freeze on the high-score screen, therefore requiring a restart and not logging the effort just made, making progress even slower than it already is.
Away from the gameplay and the horrendous issue currently had with freezing, and the game is otherwise once more a very basic experience. Music comes in the form of a repetitive track that merges into the background once you’re focussed on the action of everything ongoing, whilst the visuals from environments to enemy design are all simplistic. There are no real wow factors in the visual or audio side of things at all, yet still, the game has such a wow factor for the incredibly fluid and addictive one-more-go nature of the gameplay that even with such basics used for most of the game’s design, I simply didn’t want to put it down.
Conclusion
Overall, Gunkid 99 is a truly fantastic game. At present, you are unlikely to progress too far thanks to a mixture of true difficulty and the apparent freezing issues that plague the high-score screens, but should they be sorted with a patch in the near future, then Gunkid 99 is certainly a game worthy of your time. Whether you’re a platform maestro, a fan of simplistic games, or just looking for a challenge, this is somehow one of the most addictive games you’ll play for some time, yet equally one of the hardest.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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