Rating:

Run and shoot, shoot and run...maybe jump. Actually, jump a lot because there are a lot of zombies out there and they have a thirst for blood. Grab your shotgun and head out the door for the zombie apocalypse, but don't expect too much.

Additional Info

Full Review

There's not a lot that copious amounts of blood won't make up for. Let us not forget the lessons of Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil; slap a little gore on an otherwise mediocre game and you'll get some attention. Gun Girl 2 seems to accept this model with vigor.

The sequel to, you guessed it, Gun Girl 1 does not bring much to the table in terms of innovation. You are a random, gun-toting, arm-and-legless person, appropriately named 'Gungirl' or 'Gundude', depending on your gender preference, and you have independently decided to dispatch with all of the zombies that are mysteriously running around the world. Yes, it's just an excuse to shoot stuff.

The craftsmanship is there: the game runs nicely, the sound track is quite good, all major game mechanics work well, the quicksave feature is very useful. That's about it, though. Gun Girl 2 is really just about shooting zombies in various forms and avoiding getting touched by the fiends. There are even gun upgrades to obtain by picking up cute, pink letter Gs. What should be a simple, bloody formula somehow gets botched in the execution.

Realistic locations are stylized to work as stages for a platform game and this is fine, even to be expected, but the stages lack a particular flow. The sprites look flat and the backgrounds are messy. You are often horded by zombies without sufficient firepower to kill them between reloads, so you are forced into a jumping-dodging game to avoid them but end up getting hit anyway. I was very annoyed at not only losing health when taking a hit, but losing the gun upgrade power as well; it felt like unnecessary punishment in a game where it seems you're expected to take a few lumps from the zombie opponents.

So my irritation with the game is not that it is too difficult or that it's just a bad game; it's not and there are enjoyable elements to it. My frustration is that all the elements together simply do not work, or at least not as well as they should. I just got bored after a short amount of time. In a game where I am supposed to be mowing down waves of zombies, I am spending more time dodging them in a fuddled jumping dance or leaping on top of boxes from which I can't shoot down. I'm irritated that I can't get my gun upgraded, and when I face the boss I don't stand a chance. Sure, some games are meant to be difficult but there is a stern line between difficult and relatively unplayable.

So give Gun Girl 2 a chance and maybe you'll enjoy it more than I.