GUNHEAD review

A head made of guns, and bullets for brains?

True to its name, GUNHEAD lets you play as a mech that can equip a quartet of weapons to its alloy noggin. There are a variety of different suits that players can unlock and hop into, each offering a different balance of mobility, defensive strength, and jetpack capacity. Once you acquire a bit of in-game wealth, you can pilot mechs like the Archangel or the Rook. The former allows players to dexterously hover about without limitation while the latter suit extends the ability to quintuple-jump around as you invade space vessels defended by drones. Agreeably, developer Alientrap encourages experimentation, allowing you to build a custom loadout for each suit from an armory of more than fifty weapons. Many of the powerful ones will need to be unlocked first, though.

Narration is accomplice by a varied crew of support non-humanoid characters who communicate via Star Fox-like screens on your HUD. Expectedly, they’ll provide a bit of training before your first attempt at a starship takeover. Although you can attempt to charge right in and take down each craft’s core brain, prudent pirates will want to disrupt the security systems that can identify you and send additional drones to your location. With monetary bonuses for speed or killing efficiency, there are several ways to approach each mission.

Rififi, But with Grenade Launchers

At first, GUNHEAD cultivates the feeling that you are the star of a heist film. You’ll study an in-game map and disarm different defenses that strive to protect the innermost core of each ship. But before long you’ll discover that the game’s procedurally generated security systems can feel a bit similar, with variations of shields, alarms, and a form of defensive shuffling. You can select from different entry portals for each craft, which is cool. And if you find any key cards, you can use them to gain access to locked areas.

Interestingly, you might exit a door and free float around the ship’s exterior to look for a new entry point. Just know that the exteriors are protected by hulking sentry guns. Gunworld’s cell-shaded interiors might share the same bleached colored, borrowing Borderland’s visual style. But the game-world does cultivate the feeling that each ship was engineered to withstand breaches from pirate scum like you.

Although there’s gravity inside each of the crafts, you can still expect a bit of disorientation. Most rooms inside the ship you’re overtaking exhibit elaborate architecture, with all the floors, doorways, and nooks of your average Minecraft mini mansion. This kind of structural intricacies adds intrigue, as you scour a good vantage point to start targeting drones before they home in on you. Obviously, Alientrap has watched a fair share of classic sci-fi. Some of your larger opponents have red lasers that scan areas for threats. And it’s consistently rousing when you are detected, as the mighty enemy machine rumbles into attack mode- often with reinforcements in tow.

Get All Four Trigger Fingers Ready

GUNHEAD’s roguelike qualities means that you’ll stumble on a variety of randomized weapons across each run. You’ll have to worry about both ammo counts and cooldown for weapons. especially when you go double akimbo, using up to four guns to mow down enemy drones. While I tend to veer toward the safety of ranged weapons, GUNHEAD has some tempting melee devices as well. And they’ll probably save your hide when you’ve burned through your inventory of projectiles.

Expectedly, making your way through each of the seven cores in the game’s campaign becomes increasingly hectic. When you finally do confront the central nest, expect intense opposition. Not only do most bosses have protective shielding and maybe even flamethrowers, but if you missed taking out a security post, you can also expect a barrage of reinforcements. GUNHEAD’s signature battles aren’t brainy and typically revolve around shooting color-colored parts. But starting with your second capture, they are consistently chaotic. Mercifully, there’s are a trio of difficulty settings, with ‘easy’ putting up a healthy challenge.

Conclusion

While GUNHEAD’s performance is solid on robust desktops, the game can struggle on lesser hardware. Steam Deck owners can turn the game’s presets down to their lowest setting to get 60 FPS performance most of the time. But when core battles call out for legions of AI cavalry, the framerate can chug, making these showdowns especially demanding. The game’s only other fault is repetitiveness. After several runs, each subsequent conquest produces a diminishing amount of novelty. But like many action games with roguelike qualities, those first few playthroughs are entertaining.

GUNHEAD was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.