Showgunners (2023)

My endless attempt to play every indie tactics game continues! This one has a tacky murder gameshow premise, but underneath that ultraviolent veneer it's largely inspired by the first Mario + Rabbids, with very similar weapon and enemy design and the exact same type of puzzle-y overworld between levels. Even if Mario's gunslinging days are over, it's cool to see that the ideas behind his weird XCOM series still live on.

Like in Rabbids, your characters' abilities are so overwhelmingly busted that you can just run your winningest play over and over to breeze through each map, but your more limited movement options make the repetition of it all set in faster. And the play-by-play announcer constantly mispronouncing stuff in Spanish really started to grate. Other than that though, a perfectly decent time.

Bought on sale, which made it a very fair price, maybe even a bit of a steal from me.

Gameplay is the meat of this game, as it should be, although it is backed up by very fitting and well climatic music (especially good in the free DLC). It is XCOM combat, although with seemingly more fair RNG (Hard difficulty seems to be the intended way to play, since normal does skew the RNG in players favor).

All characters are rather distinct in terms of abilities, and pulling off combos and getting great turns does feel pretty great. It is not extremly difficult, but Hard does enforce some more careful decision making since a lot of characters will get 1-shotted. There is just enough in terms of abilities, items and weapons to keep you engaged for around 18 hours without getting tedious.

Visuals are nice, the comic book avatars and cutscenes fit well into the dirty cyberpunk aesthetics, and the actual graphics serve its purpose, they are quite when it gets bloody and "ragdolly".

There is nothing bad to say about it honestly. It is a good all fashioned game that favors solid gameplay above all else, has a very clear direction and vision that has been realised by people that clearly do know what they need to do, and know the genre well. It does not aim too high, it is just perfect little game that i hope finds enough of an audience to let the developers continue working on more titles in this spirit.