![]() ![]() Performance is rattly, gun-feel is inconsistent, audio frequently cuts, and combat sometimes feels like the whole thing is submerged underwater. Enemies make up for stupidity with sheer numbers, with limp stun states and death animations that rob combat of any catharsis. Melee animations feel weightless, as does the vaulting and swinging that features so frequently in traversal. It feels as if there’s a layer of gunk between you and the game, as if inputs have to pass through Vaseline before registering. Photograph: Squanch Games, Inc.īut despite all the creativity and colour, all the guns and traversal options, High on Life is not a good shooter. Impressive craft and effort … High on Life. ![]() There are some genuinely nifty and thoughtful combat options, like a ricocheting sawblade that you can bonk back at baddies, or a shotgun that hoovers protective slime from your foes. Along the way, you’ll use your chattering gun’s abilities to solve traversal puzzles in a Metroid Prime sort of way, and do a lot of shooting. You play a nameless teen bounty hunter paired up with a talking gun, travelling the universe attempting to free humanity from an alien crime syndicate that wants to use us as drugs. I can tell you that this game is consistently creative, even when new studio Squanch’s design chops fail them. ![]() You switch from a grin to a grimace every 15 seconds and at some point, your face just goes numb. Observations about the self-reflexive observations. It’s no longer a series of clearly delineated jokes, more a transcendental oneness with an eternal bit. You spend enough time spacefaring in Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s orbit and eventually, you get sucked into the void. Humour is subjective, sure, but also, after eight hours of this game’s rapid-fire jokes, I’m not sure I even know any more. The Gunk is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.I honestly can’t tell you whether High on Life is funny. On my scale of 1-10, the game’s art, graphics, and controls pulled it from the fire of my irritation towards the script reading, looping of dull tunes, and shortness of story, I’m giving it a 7/10. Another bad thing about The Gunk is that it’s a “One and done” kind of game, where once you finish it, you most likely will never play it again which is a shame as it’s a really visually beautiful game. When it came to the dynamic between Rani and Becks I felt a bit lost about who they were to each other which a longer story may have shed a bit more light on that. The worse thing about the game I felt was the length, it could have been longer as I beat it in two days making it feel like there could have been more potential for the story. Overall The Gunk is a pleasant surprise that has its good and bad takes. I also like the detail of the faces of Rani and Becks when they talk during gameplay where you can see when their mouths move their lips are animated to move with the voice-over perfectly, not bad for an indie studio as you normally see this in some AAA games. With the system I’m playing on with a 4k HDMI cable, it really made the colors pop and bring the world of this mysterious planet to life. ![]() The biggest thing I loved about the game was the graphics and art. Solder is pronounced “Sod-Er” but it was read as “Saul-der”, and Gruel which is pronounced “Grool” was read as “Grull” (the “Ull” sounding like it would in the word “dull”), rant over on that part. With the voice acting, it was good but there are a couple of things that need to be said, someone clearly was not paying attention to how Nova and Turner said some of their lines near the start of the game where the actresses said some words wrong the two words being “Solder” and “Gruel”. The sound design is pretty good, the soundtrack is OK but some of the songs can be a bit much as they’re not that long and on a loop. When it comes to interacting with the Gunk itself it’s very satisfying using your power glove to suck it up, seriously it’s unusually satisfying! Onto the game itself, the controls for The Gunk are pretty straightforward and thankfully minimal and respond well especially during combat. The Gunk takes players to an unknown world where they play as Rani, voiced by Fiona Nova (Rooster Teeth), who along with Becks, voiced by Abigail Turner (Remothered: Broken Porcelain) landed on a strange planet where they hope to find resources that could make them rich but instead discover a planet full of Gunk, a festering growth that’s slowly killing the planet and hides secrets to an ancient civilization. Things suck on this planet, could it be worse anywhere else? Well, Thunderful has shown that the grass is not always greener on other worlds in their sci-fi exploration game The Gunk. ![]()
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