A game that feels like a poor man's homage to DMC that was developed in 2008, buried, and then discovered in 2022. I don't even think this would've been a good game in 2008 though, it's just so chunky and stiff.

It wants to be over-the-top and arcadey (least this feels intentional), but it is more of a half step in that direction than a full commitment. The action, the attacks, the enemies, their own attacks, it just all feels so toned down. The special attacks all feel the same. The only differences are the ranges on those special attacks and how long they take to charge and use, that's about it. Most of the time I completely forgot to use them.

There's not a whole lot of purpose to any of the attacks in this game. They don't feel good to use, they don't feel easy or fun to chain together. I got through this game mostly just holding down the shoot button and dispose of the waves that were coming at me with my melee attack. Both attacks do enough damage to just about anything, even at a normal difficulty. I didn't try it on anything harder than that so maybe the other attacks are more worthwhile but I just never found any motivation to try and make this game last longer than it already did.

The gameplay does feature an upgrade system like you'd see in games like Bayonetta. You can unlock more generic special attacks and damage/health/range upgrades as well. Those upgrades were pretty noticeable at the very least.

The game does feature a few technical hiccups and some glitches, but honestly, the game was pretty stable outside of a few quirks. The sound mix at the start is very poorly done with the special effects completely drowning out any background music this game features. You can adjust these things in the options, but I've rarely had to do this with a modern game. That being said, the audio isn't anything to write home about in either direction. It's just the same generic bullet sounds and upbeat electronic music.

The story is also so hard to follow and pretty bad from what I was putting together. The entirety of the story is told through load screen text. That's it. There are cutscenes but you won't really be able to put together the things going on just in these sequences.

Despite all of this, I beat this game. It's just so fascinatingly bad in just the right way. The gameplay is so blase that it just washes over you, so it's easy to just shut your brain off and let the bad aspects just keep coming without too much frustration. So maybe play this and there's something better/great about this game that I'm just not picking up on? It's weird, it's bad, it's still kinda weird and bad enough to recommend. But probably don't play this? I dunno, if you're still reading this at this point you should just give it a shot.

It's hard to address Gungrave G.O.R.E without first talking about the elephant in the room; that being the amount of players, both on the critics and average players' sides of things, that just didn't seem to click with the game. In many respects, I can see where they're coming from. They're likely people with zero frame of reference for what Gungrave is, which can't exactly be helped. The original PS2 games are stranded with seemingly no hope of full HD remasters, and the only shot you had of getting your foot in the door was the VR exclusive title released to whet the appetites of the few fans left.

But having played the original 2 entries just earlier this year, being blown away by the original's method of "Go in, give you all its ideas and style, then pissing off before it overstays its welcome", and then feeling Overdose is a contender for the worst game I've ever played, G.O.R.E wound up generally pleasing me. Are my standards just low? I mean, I don't think I go into any video game expecting too much.

The gameplay's as Gungrave as Gungrave gets; you're presented with a linear series of levels, told to kill everything that moves and build up a huge combo while doing so, and left to go wild. It knows what made the first game so satisfying, and adds to it by giving you more mechanics to the combat, like multiple combos to your coffin's melee attack. On a core gameplay level, it's genuinely everything I wanted it to be. The music is also genuinely pretty great stuff when you can hear it, despite the lack of both the main Gungrave theme, and the first game's beautiful "Here Comes The Rain". Hard to say Tetsuya Shibata missed, as I'd expect from a composer on DMC2, 3 and 4.

That's not to say G.O.R.E is anything close to perfect, mind. I played this following several post-release patches that rebalanced many aspects of the game, which definitely sound like they make for a better experience. Unfortunately, things like a lack of button remapping, an insanely grindy shop full of worthless RPG-style stat increases, some fucked sound design with SEs missing in pretty blatant places, and a good chunk of late-game levels that serve to massively drag in combination with the overall 31(!) total stage count, are chief among the biggest issues with the title. Some of those could easily be adjusted via further patches, others are more deeply engraned with the title.

And yet, in spite of plenty of issues, I walked away from Gungrave G.O.R.E generally satisfied. Again, maybe I'm easy to please, or maybe I'm the target audience as probably the biggest "Gungrave 1 is amazing" guy of 2023, but it's easy to see where people's problems lie. Even I, as someone who liked it, thinks it's got a little bit more polishing to do before I'm ready to call it great. If you're a fan of that first, humble little PS2 title, I'd say grab it on sale, or give it a whirl on Game Pass if you've got a sub.