Guncraft Review

We're really getting into the swing of things now, aren't we, indie developers? Ever since Minecraft made roughly enough money to plate the moon in solid gold it seems like you can't even pop down to the grocery store without tripping over half a dozen games that have jumped onto its bandwagon. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing - there's plenty of potential here, after all - but like with every new development in gaming, the slew of thinly-veiled imitators that follow in its wake are a more depressing insight into the human condition than a documentary on quadruple amputees. Make no mistake, I'm never ready to just cry 'rip-off' at the sight of a game that's run away with Minecraft's visuals - or even several of its gameplay mechanics - since a lot of really quite good games started off blatantly coveting their popular forebears, but you had better get up on the stage and show us something damn clever if you do because you just lost took a major hit to the originality points. As a result, it's fair to say that Exacto Games Studio might have really been onto something with Guncraft, a voxel-centric multiplayer first-person shooter recently Greenlit for Steam, but like diving into a paddling pool full of chocolate custard, the idea is far more appealing than the reality.

If you're accustomed to jamming an ironsight into your eye sockets every time you want to put bullets in something then you'll probably slip into Guncraft's gunplay like an old pair of unwashed underpants. Evidently Exacto couldn't decide whether to blindly dawdle after recent iterations of Call of Duty or Battlefield, so they opted for both, and as a result the frame we get for our violence is a typical modern military shooter with vehicular warfare served on the side. Pick your class, sprint around the map, spot your foe, apply ironsight to face and press the angry button until one of you dies. Oh, sometimes there are objectives to worry about and killstreaks if you can remember to bother with them, but that's the gist of it. I have my own personal disdain for this style of gameplay, which has blossomed like an overdue corpse flower over the first-person shooter market over the last few years, but it seems that this is what people like nowadays so I'll reserve my vitriol for more universally distasteful features.

At any time - assuming the default game mode settings are selected - you can switch to and from build mode, which removes your gun and gives you the usual block-placing interface that's imprinted on the inside of every long-term Minecraft player's eyelids. This mixes up the bog-standard gunplay by allowing you to build things in the heat of battle, patching up the terrain (which is fully destructible unless you specify otherwise) and maybe building some walls and staircases if you have the time. I got a bit caught up in this once on a larger map but my interior decoration endeavours were sadly cut short when an attack helicopter delivered a missile through an open window and reduced me to a handful of Lego bricks.

Being able to destroy and create terrain while the bullets are flying past has real potential - leave one person back at the base to build steadily more elaborate fortifications while the rest of you lead the assault, for example - but comes with some very unfortunate implications since traditionally the FPS has thrived on exquisitely-balanced level design. Ask the right person about Counter-Strike's Dust2 or Quake 3's Campgrounds and you'll be inundated with gushing descriptions of choke points and spawn positions and arenas, but once you start blasting holes in walls and blocking off doorways all semblance of such a delicate balance gets tossed right out the window, resulting in maps that quickly lose any sense of structure or direction. This isn't the bah-humbug ramblings of an elitist either, because this mechanic often leads to situations that simply aren't fun by any stretch of the term. I had a round of CTF set in a blatant clone of Halo's Blood Gulch with a handful of other players and after a solid ten minutes of blasting each-other to pieces our bases were no longer navigable by any reasonable means, consisting of the indestructible flag platform floating in a cloud of suspended blocks that couldn't be traversed without a PhD in first-person platforming and a theodolite.

Regardless of how you like your pointy shooty action, you'd probably agree with me if I said that movement should be quick, smooth and tightly-controlled. Obviously in an environment entirely composed out of waist-high cubes this requires a careful approach with a bit of finesse and thinking, but Guncraft apparently just can't be arsed. Do you remember hammering the jump button in Minecraft for about thirty seconds in order to climb up a large hill? Well I hope you enjoyed it, because that's the best way to get up a staircase in Guncraft, with the only other option being an automatic but equally-awkward climbing process triggered by sprinting at the slope in question with a mad disregard for the state of your kneecaps. Both of them break flow like a rhinoceros on a two-lane highway, turning the mere sight of an upward incline into something to be feared and killing any sensation of pulse-pounding action you might have been experiencing. Even jumping itself seems float-y and unresponsive with very little air control - as if Guncraft's combat all takes place in a vacuum - and doesn't seem to have any meaningful relationship with your motion on the ground, since you can be moving at full speed in the opposite direction to your jump the instant you touch the ground. These sound like minor gripes, but this is a genre where control over your movement and orientation is central to gameplay - well, that and being able to relocate people's grey matter via the medium of bullets - and Guncraft's system simply is far too clunky for the environments it creates or the gameplay it centres itself around.

It seems petty to criticise the appearance of a game that's deliberately low-fi, especially when its substance is so much more fascinating, but this is a multiplayer title after all so anything you experience once - including the visuals - you are guaranteed to experience several hundred times more. Minecraft's iconic appearance has been quietly aped so many times that I'm surprised Mojang hasn't tried to bolt it down, but there's only so many ways to render a world made entirely of waist-high cubes without just throwing your arms in the air in despair and slapping retro textures on everything, so Guncraft only earns itself a cuffed ear for that little transgression. Sadly it throws away the chance to claw back ground by slapping the rest of its presentation on with a similar lack of grace. Guns rattle like automatic staplers, water imitates a static bluish haze, and puffs of smoke masquerading as explosions try to mask the vanishing terrain, creating a combat experience that feels about as visceral as a day at the tax office. Perhaps the lovely people at Exacto were concerned with keeping visuals clean and clear - in which case they ought to be congratulated for recognising one of the key problems in the modern first-person shooter and taking steps to fix it - but there's a very real difference between 'clean and clear' and 'starkly underwhelming'.

It's a damn shame, I tell you, because Guncraft was clearly on the right track at one point, even if it has long since derailed and killed several passengers. A plethora of really quite nice features with a focus on enabling user-generated content are supplied, ranging from skin and class customisation to map editing and even gun creation. Earning the award of 'best semi-original feature' - or perhaps 'only semi-original feature' - the gun editor lets you sculpt the model with your reliable arsenal of multicoloured cubes, select the basic weapon type, pour points into weapon stats like a slightly psychotic character sheet, then go test it. Despite the limitations imposed by having to select the basic functionality from a predefined list - meaning, for instance, you cannot create a gun that shoots homing missiles or miniature grizzly bears - it's quite clever and, rather astoundingly, seems like the sort of thing that would be difficult to abuse. Guns can be uploaded and voted into the game proper, so if you do happen to find a way to abuse the gun-crafting system, feel free to share it with the community and watch it burn.

Ultimately the hammer that drives the final nail into Guncraft's coffin is not its poor implementation or originality deficit - god forbid there are enough games out there like that and they still manage to sell somehow - but its lack of cohesion. It doesn't feel like a product that was explicitly designed at any point, merely Frankensteined together out of the severed gibs of several more successful titles without any meaningful recognition of what the positive qualities of its inspirations actually are. You can't make a good game like this any more than you can make a delicious meal by throwing all your favourite foodstuffs into the stew-pot and boiling it up for a few minutes. I'm still confident that there's a way to marry the chocolate spread of voxel-centric gameplay with the zesty HP sauce of first-person shooters, but all Guncraft's stew-pot approach leaves you with is a bad taste in your mouth.