Gunstar Heroes is an exhilarating action Run'n'Gun that knows how to make the player feel powerful. Like most games in this vein, normal enemies are incredibly weak in comparison to your abilities, and in this not only can you shoot them down with a unique weapon system, but you can also grapple and toss them like flies. This made for some pretty fun action and a great time for the first half of the game, though as explained later I thought the second half was quite a bitch.
The weapon system is what really binds this game together, and involves 4 different pickups which you can hold up to 2. These are a laser beam that shoots through enemies, one that speeds up your bullet output, one that has an auto aim, and another that's a flamethrower. The cool thing is that if you have both slots filled, those 2 items will combine to form an even better item, thus leading to a couple of neat combinations to try out. As mentioned, there's also a bit of melee here and there, such as an air kick as well as a grapple and throw, and sometimes there are segments that encourage you to use it instead of your guns.
The stages are quite a mixed bag and range from pretty amazing design to extremely questionable, this is pretty much split into the first and second half of the game. The first half allows you to pick any of the four starting stages, and they're the best ones in the game to me. Two of them stand out the most, one being a rail shooter stage with an exciting multi-phase boss fight, and another containing a board game where tiles represent different things you have to do, such as quick mini-bosses. After these 4 stages come ones in a linear format, and they're such an incredible lift in difficulty. There are a lot of long segments in them without any checkpoints, which really soured the mood considering the first four had a healthy balance of them. There is a neat Schmup section near the end, but unfortunately, it becomes quite a chore due to being rather long and having not a single checkpoint at all. The final stage involves a long boss rush where you need to beat everyone in one go, but then gives you a checkpoint for the final fight which is significantly easier than those, this makes for a questionably unbalanced finale that I did not really enjoy.
I do however still recommend this game for those first four stages, they have a lot of variation in them that makes this a solid entry in the Run'n'Gun world. Tackling the rest is probably more enjoyable through the usage of save states since you're going to notice a pretty immediate difference in difficulty and quality. At the moment I purchased it for 99 cents on Steam, so that's more than a fair price for the amount of good content at least.
The weapon system is what really binds this game together, and involves 4 different pickups which you can hold up to 2. These are a laser beam that shoots through enemies, one that speeds up your bullet output, one that has an auto aim, and another that's a flamethrower. The cool thing is that if you have both slots filled, those 2 items will combine to form an even better item, thus leading to a couple of neat combinations to try out. As mentioned, there's also a bit of melee here and there, such as an air kick as well as a grapple and throw, and sometimes there are segments that encourage you to use it instead of your guns.
The stages are quite a mixed bag and range from pretty amazing design to extremely questionable, this is pretty much split into the first and second half of the game. The first half allows you to pick any of the four starting stages, and they're the best ones in the game to me. Two of them stand out the most, one being a rail shooter stage with an exciting multi-phase boss fight, and another containing a board game where tiles represent different things you have to do, such as quick mini-bosses. After these 4 stages come ones in a linear format, and they're such an incredible lift in difficulty. There are a lot of long segments in them without any checkpoints, which really soured the mood considering the first four had a healthy balance of them. There is a neat Schmup section near the end, but unfortunately, it becomes quite a chore due to being rather long and having not a single checkpoint at all. The final stage involves a long boss rush where you need to beat everyone in one go, but then gives you a checkpoint for the final fight which is significantly easier than those, this makes for a questionably unbalanced finale that I did not really enjoy.
I do however still recommend this game for those first four stages, they have a lot of variation in them that makes this a solid entry in the Run'n'Gun world. Tackling the rest is probably more enjoyable through the usage of save states since you're going to notice a pretty immediate difference in difficulty and quality. At the moment I purchased it for 99 cents on Steam, so that's more than a fair price for the amount of good content at least.