More like Gungrave B.O.R.E.

Let me start off by saying I never played the original Gungrave, though I was aware of its existence as well as the Madhouse anime that was based on it, so I wasn't really all that invested in the whole franchise comeback thing. I did however grow up with similar games from that era, and G.O.R.E. promised to be a fun throwback to those days, the kind of game that is rarely made anymore. But there's a big difference between mindless fun and braindead slog, and unfortunately this disaster is a textbook example of the latter.

The core gameplay is very simple, you walk forward, you keep shooting, enemies die and once the room is clear you walk through a newly opened door to another room and repeat the process. You're essentially a walking turret section. It doesn't feel bad for approximately two levels, but by then you've seen all the game has to offer and you start noticing how horribly stale the gameplay loop is, and the devs did absolutely nothing to make it interesting. If anything, they did everything they could to make it as tedious as possible...

For example, almost every fight has enemies that block bullets, forcing you to use either melee that doesn't work most of the time since the attacks either rarely ever connect or the combo inputs simply don't register, or you can go into Fury Mode which increases your damage by like 5% (so it's more like Mild Agitation Mode) and allows you to break enemy shields with gunfire for a brief duration. Forget about jumping over shielded enemies and shooting them in the back, they were too lazy to give them proper hitboxes so even with their backs exposed the bullets simply don't go through, that is if you manage to even jump over them since touching an enemy stops you dead in the tracks and your jumps have no forward momentum when jumping from a standing position, making you frontflip in one spot while eating thousands of bullets. This all of course completely breaks the pace of the game and is designed to simply stall you in the most annoying way possible.

Movement overall is very sluggish, Grave is a super slow runner, walks even slower when shooting, and to make things worse he's constantly staggered by pretty much everything coming your way. Explosions, melee attacks, sniper shots, shotgun shots, they all knock you back, make you stop shooting and force you into a small recovery animation that triggers your real life fury mode. You can actually reflect rockets and grenades with a melee attack, but it's rarely useful when it's raining grenades from every direction as if you were playing World at War on Veteran, you WILL get hit anyway. In late stages of the game it also introduces enemy types that can instadrain your shields, which feels incredibly cheap.

There are special abilities called Demolition Shots that have various effects, but only two of them are really useful - the powerful railgun-like sniper shot that instakills everything in front of you, and the slow-mo ability that buys you some breathing space for a moment. These abilities are however only ever useful on harder difficulties, since they recover a portion of your health based on how many Demolition Points they cost to use, otherwise they just add Art Points for every kill, basically this game's version of a style meter that is completely useless since all it does is affect your end level rating, or at least it's supposed to, because even if you get the worst Art Points rating possible, you'll still most likely get an overall A, or B at worst. The rating also gives you DNA points you can spend on upgrades and more Demolition Shots, but regardless of your ranking, the amount of DNA points you get is so low that it took me three full playthroughs of mostly A ranks to upgrade everything.

Level design is basically nonexistent, this whole game is just one long corridor and the only path you can take is forward. It would be so much better if there was some exploration tied into the loop, maybe let you hunt down some collectibles, upgrades or even just some readables that would serve some worldbuilding purpose, I'd take anything that would feel at least remotely rewarding in this absolute yawnfest.

To spice things up there's a dozen or so boss fights, most of them however are cheap reskins that, much like the rest of the game, require absolutely zero thinking to beat, which is a shame because I actually liked some of the bigger beast designs.

Music ended up being pretty meh as well, the combat themes are straight up annoying and it feels like there's only two or three of them on repeat with your generic DnB/electrorock mashup that you'd expect from this type of game, and the only pieces I actually enjoyed were the quiet moment-of-calm songs that you unfortunately hear for like 30 seconds per level.

To the developers' credit, they did patch a lot of stuff since launch. I played the game day one and it was an actual health hazard, you had to tap the right trigger to shoot, i.e. the button with the most resistance on the Series X controller, so after three or so levels your hand would start painfully cramping up, and I believe playing through the entire game like that would do some permanent damage to you. Thankfully they added a Full Auto mode which allows you to keep shooting by simply holding the trigger, making the game even less engaging, but at least playable. They also added Bunji as a playable character, whom you played as for a mission and a half during the story, and the only difference between him and Grave is the fact that Bunji has less abilities, otherwise you can just treat him as an extra skin. But hey, he was free.

What really blows my mind is that this game was supposed to be in development since 2017, so THIS is what they came up with in 5 years? Sometimes people describe a game as "some fake game that a character would play in a movie", and it perfectly applies here. Based on what I've read in some interviews, it was originally supposed to be open-world game, so my guess is they spent years working on something that proved to be beyond their capabilities, scrapped that project completely and then put this together in a couple of months before they hit the deadline. In the hands of a more experienced developer, someone like Suda51 for example, this game would absolutely shine with cool ideas and creativity, but as it is right now, it's one of the laziest fully-priced games out there, and the only redeeming factor is the fact that they had the decency to launch it on Game Pass.