Steam Curator

The roguelite sci-fi shooter ‘GUNHEAD’ is a sequel to 2017’s Cryptark: a game which I’ve never played and, unlike its sequel, is very 2D. Its presence can be felt while playing GUNHEAD not because you’re missing out on setup, but because GUNHEAD feels like a game boldly intent on taking advantage of its 3D space.

Gameplay styles and traversal options created in fealty of this new dimension are combat rooms that are way more vertical than otherwise, and the fact that all the levels take place inside of ships that can be exited and flown above or below—letting you jump to adjacent rooms or skip them altogether if you take a quick trip out the airlock.

The actual shooting is floaty and its build variety only meaningfully sustains five or six hours worth of runs, but its navigational freedom anchor those runs inside of an enjoyable high-speed framework that lets you pick and choose which challenges you want to undertake, and which you want to fly right by. The result is a fun, if finite, roguelite shooter.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3076150047

In GUNHEAD you pilot the GUNHEAD, at least for your first run. There are five different mechs you can unlock, each sharing the ability to wield up to four weapons simultaneously, and each differing based on how they fly. Most have some variation of a quick-to-refuel jetpack, one has a grappling hook, and another has no-limitations-flight. All that movement will become very relevant once you see our setting.

You’re in space, and you work for a salvaging company tasked with extracting key information from not-so-derelict space stations. Each “run” is a sequence of five different stations, and each station consists of about a dozen rooms with varying functions.

Unlike a conventional roguelike, those rooms and their connections aren’t opaque. You have a crew feeding you info by ear, most importantly a tactical map that leaves nothing to the imagination. You can see exactly where the ship boss is and where the shields are before you even depart home base.

No room in GUNHEAD exists in a vacuum; you aren’t siloed off the second an encounter starts and that’s important because cross-room interactions are the games biggest shtick. The boss is usually protected by one or two decentralized shield rooms, those shield rooms might trigger alarm systems, and those alarm systems might be guarded by enemy spawns.

It’s a game of target prioritization and time management: most of the run-incentivizing contracts you get have time clauses, so trying to clear out every room and every system to weaken the boss might come at the cost of your run’s payout. In the latter half of your run, or even in loopable future runs, you’ll need to determine which subsystems are critical to dispose of and which you’re okay leaving up based on the game state. The speed at which those time-clauses necessitate (and those traversal tools allow) you to fly from room to room give GUNHEAD’s encounters an unbreaking flow that results in an enjoyable pace and lots of autonomy in how you approach each ship.

Between the contracts, the home team coaching you on via comms, and the ability to see the entire ship’s system via map: there’s an almost ‘heist-like’ quality to the infiltration of each of these spaceships.

You can also quickly travel from wing to wing of the vessels thanks to the many airlocks that lead outside. If an encounter’s going south you can just book it for space and re-enter through a different portal, assuming you can squeeze in the two second gate opening animation before dying.

It’s a cool trick and helps give the ships themselves a sense of tangibility: they are literally pieces of construction out here in the vacuum of space that you can circumnavigate. Sadly the ability to exfiltrate is used as little more than an exterior hallway, there’s no encounters or events outside sans some cannons shooting at you, and the samey visual designs of all the ships don’t help sell the fantasy either.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3076150000

The actual combat itself has a few interesting wrinkles. The four weapons each GUNHEAD comes equipped with are shot with independent keystrokes slash button presses that give you this feeling of controlling a multi-faceted piece of equipment. In addition to your ability to fly around with the jetpack you also get a short cooldown dash move, helpful both for dodging but also offensive repositioning—enemies frequently have positional damage reduction like shields that necessitate quick flanks to actually deal damage. Boss design uses this concept to great effect, sometimes having weak spots that will reorient their location on the bosses body.

You also have to contend with all that verticality: rooms are frequently multiple stories high, and entry into one demands you quickly 360 pan the area looking for threats lest an enemy finds your back. In practice it doesn’t play all that differently from a ‘six-degrees-of-freedom’ aerial shooter. Despite the fact that you do have more conventional action controls, you do need to be thinking about the arena via more axes than usual.

The actual shooting itself is a relative low-point: it’s competent but lacks weight or feedback, ensuring that most of the thrills within GUNHEAD usually come from the traversal towards and strategy of the fights, rather than the actual fights themselves.

That goes for the more rogue-elements of the game as well: the mechs are well differentiated by mobility and health but offensively their only distinction is their starting weapons that you’ll normally replace pretty quickly into the run. The powers themselves don’t present as choices either, you just pick them up off the ground and accept whatever stat increase they provide which, with few exceptions, rarely change how you pilot all that much.

Which is all to say that GUNHEAD’s best couple of hours are its first couple of hours. There isn’t enough differentiation in its actual mechanics to warrant the long-term play this genre frequently prioritizes, but its unrestricted ship layouts and high speed traversal focus give it a unique enough flair to warrant a weekend of enjoyable space-salvaging with it.

It’s a game that excels at giving you exciting vertical combat arenas but also stringing those arenas together in ways that make them greater than the sum of their parts, plus providing traversal tools that make navigating those rooms a breeze.

You’ll feel like you’ve seen its limits long before you check all of its boxes but, much like any good heist, you’ll get the best results if you know when to get out.