Greedy Guns Review

So, which kind of person are you, reader? There are only two kinds, you know. I’m not talking about whether you think pineapple belongs on a pizza, or which way around you unspool your loo roll. Hell, I’m not even talking about politics. No, the only metric that matters here is where you stand on Games Done Quick: Save the Animals, or Kill the Animals? One is canonically correct, wholesome, and quite frankly, the decent thing to do; the other is letting peaceful, intelligent, soon-to-be endangered wildlife perish in pursuit of what is, after all, just a number. Biased? Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you’re looking for a new experience that blends your dual interests in Metroid and killing off alien wildlife for money, you might just find it in Greedy Guns.

That’s about the only segue I can think of for a game like this, sorry. You play a sassy space mercenary with an insatiable lust for wealth—see, that’s like an intergalactic bounty hunter, but less glamourous—and your benefactors have landed you on a wild, untamed planet full of ancient ruins, explicitly for the task of killing its biggest, rarest monsters so somebody can scoop their jellied remains into a petri dish. At the behest of an authoritative bureaucratic hand, you hunt down, kill, and absorb the powers of the local fauna and flora, but it quickly becomes apparent that your trail of ecological destruction has more sinister, far-reaching effects. Is it possible these monsters actually have some higher purpose? What are the motives of that masked phantom that keeps turning up around you? And most importantly of all, where are all these extraterrestrial monsters getting these mountains of loose change?

Anyway, yes, we’re doing the Metroidvania thing again: platforming, combat and exploration, topped off with a mild layer of backtracking and hunting for secrets. Enemies get in your way, enemies die, enemies drop money, and money goes towards buying new guns, hence the name of the game, I suppose. Seems a little unfair to accuse the guns of greed rather than the hands that wield them, but you’ve got to keep the title snappy somehow. Breaking away from the genre’s usual loose-ish encounter design standards, Greedy Guns frequently tends to favour discrete fights, often sealing the exits before throwing waves of specially crafted shoot 'em up (shmup)-style enemy and bullet patterns at you. Learning to dodge attacks properly is very much a non-negotiable requirement, and while the game never descends into the maddening cavernous echelons of bullet hell, there’s still a fair amount of bobbing and weaving through gaps tighter than a miser’s purse, particularly in the later stages. It feels somewhat strange, facing up against challenges with such particular intent and direction, especially when the very nature of a Metroidvania means that I could have completely different tools for dealing with them every time I pass through, but Greedy Guns makes it work.

“Pass through” feels like a bit of a misnomer, though; you won’t be going anywhere in a hurry, at least not if Greedy Guns has a say. Fights frequently drag on like meals with your rotund auntie and uncle, piling additional waves of mobs onto your plate again and again before you can say “no thanks, I’ve mastered this pattern already”. Every enemy seems to take twice as much punishment as they reasonably ought to, dishing out two or three cycles of their attack patterns even when they have your gun barrel’s undivided attention, and there’s a very real possibility that the game has an equally bothersome enemy lined up to replace them within seconds of you putting them in the ground. You can sometimes just run past encounters, of course, and when my patience ran out I occasionally did, but even when the game doesn’t explicitly lock you into a room, it’ll often strategically plonk down especially large and spongey enemies in your way just to make you give up and face the music. In short, it’s padded enough to stop a runaway semi-trailer, and if you’re anything like me, that’ll put creases in your brow before long.

To be fair, Greedy Guns does try to scoot you along from time to time, albeit with varying levels of success. One feature that snuck under the door with the rest of the shmup-style influences is the presence of swarms: weak enemies in massive groups that burst out of nowhere and home in on you like you’re carrying the last packet of Jaffa cakes in the galaxy. It can get jolly intimidating, especially when you realise the game is spawning in more enemies at a faster rate than you could possibly exterminate them, and that it’s time to cut and run. Numerous sequences have you cornered or chased through an area by the alien equivalent of a cloud of angry bees, and while the way they’re used to exert pressure is sort of intriguing, a close shave is only tense if you pull it off the first time around, which was rarely the case. Usually I would suffer a humiliating fate because in the heat of the moment I wasn’t sure which way was forward, or I hadn’t realised that the game had arbitrarily opened an exit without any fanfare. Sorry, I was too busy focusing on my imminent death-by-nibbling to notice that you’d sprung the back door, Greedy Guns.

Little design stumbles of this variety are weirdly prominent in Greedy Guns, unfortunately. The game neglects to direct your attention towards important things happening, like platforms vanishing into the ether or important targets appearing on-screen, and lacks basic feedback for things like switching weapons or activating elevators. Platforms feel like they’ve been placed in such a way that that a single jump is insufficient but a double jump is overkill, making every long ascent laborious in a very subtle, slightly maddening fashion. Early on there’s a bit where you have no choice but to make a blind jump into a pit, and the game gives you an achievement labelled ‘Leap of Faith’ like it’s going “ah-haaaaah, gotcha nerd!”, but later on you’ll find yourself making actual leaps of faith anyway, which gives the whole joke a bit of an acidic aftertaste. Part of the issue is the camera, which largely just zooms and pans on its own—presumably to accommodate the local co-op—and focuses on whatever the developers felt was most important. That’s fine, until it’s extremely not fine.

This isn’t to say Greedy Guns doesn’t have strong points, usually when it boils down to a nice simple boss fight. Sure, a few of them tend to rely too heavily on flooding the arena with their repulsive offspring—an approach to complicating fights that sits on the triteness scale just below ‘do the same routine but faster’—and sure, it’d be nice if they didn’t turn around and go “actually I’m invincible now, I have a magic shield, you can’t hurt me, nyeh nyeh” quite so often, but they have some legitimately solid attack patterns and offer a challenge that feels like an appropriate step-up from the rest of the game. They’re also supposed to offer clever glimpses into the nature of the powers you’ll tear from their cooling bodies, but often the links come off as a bit tenuous; a bit ‘was that really the defining feature?’ One boss crawls up the walls underneath you like a hideous living elevator, so you could be forgiven for thinking that it might grant you some means of scaling vertical surfaces. Nope, you get the shouty knockback move it does occasionally. Except it’s not a knockback when you use it; it just shatters crystals.

Is that a problem, that it ‘just’ shatters crystals? Well, yes, sort of. Part of the beauty of a good Metroidvania’s design is, to me, artfully gating the world in such a way that acquiring a new ability changes one’s perspective on the world; creatively applying your new power to overcome obstacles you may not even have realised were obstacles, revisiting older areas and chipping away at layers that once seemed impenetrable. At a purely abstract level, you might as well just be finding different coloured keys for different coloured doors, but by elegantly obfuscating the pair of them—turning the former into a versatile tool, and the latter into some innocuous feature of the landscape—the whole experience becomes so much more engaging. Greedy Guns doesn’t really do that. Every ability you gain—and I’ll warn you now: there aren’t many of them—can be applied in exactly one way to bypass exactly one obstacle, in a manner that becomes blatantly obvious the moment you acquire it, if not before. You acquire a dodge-roll, for example, and are taught that it lets you slip through a toxic waterfall without being hurt. “Great!” you may think, imagining using it to bypass a giant crushing plate, or the segments of a mighty burrowing annelid, or a chap in the supermarket who you haven’t spoken to since high school. Nope, sorry, just the same toxic waterfalls, blocking your way in the same fashion, over and over. Key. Door.

Even if Greedy Guns’ tools were more nuanced, though, I’m not sure they would’ve been enough to get me to explore the world any more than necessary. I love to peel back the layers of a well-constructed space, meticulously uncover its secrets and fill out every map square, but it’s hard to get that sort of ball rolling without something enticing to hunt for in the first place. What’s out there? Well, there are Zelda-style heart container pieces, but they’re not exactly what you’d call ‘exciting’, especially when it takes four of them just to staple the tiniest marginal upgrade onto the end of your health bar. Bulbs full of loose change are hidden away too—another head-scratching facet of this planet’s ecosystem, presumably preyed on by some manner of horrifying vending machine beast—but again, they’re far from a life-changing windfall. Money’s only function is to buy the guns you’ve found, and yes, new weapons are always a tempting proposition—you never know, you might like them more than the ones you’re carrying right now—but after so many tiresome drawn-out rooms, chances are you’ll end up willing to settle for second-best rather than double-back in search of new toys.

Greedy Guns is fine. Maybe that’s not the most articulate verdict ever reached, but it’s probably one of the most honest. It’s a box-ticker: a game that, at least on paper, has all the base components of a successful formula, but rarely goes above and beyond. It works. It doesn’t break out of nowhere. It’s not frustrating. You won’t clear it in less than an afternoon. We don’t celebrate milestones like that often, but they’re a significant part of establishing a baseline. With its tentative forays into twin-stick and shmup-style combat, Greedy Guns makes a serious attempt to pull itself above that baseline, but its dull world design, padded encounters and poor attempts at directing the player keep it from really paying out.