possibly the most dreamcast-esque title to end up on the xbox, specifically in that bizarre control scheme. left trigger jump, right trigger shoot, different weapons mapped to the different face buttons (except for A, which goes conspicously unused), tank controls on left stick, inverted constrained camera on right stick, and boosting on the left stick button. there's a little bit of "you'll get used to it," but man is it a completely asinine control scheme that both simultaneously wastes valuable controller space and feels clunky up through the end game. an action TPS without strafing is already difficult enough, and somehow they managed to bungle it even more by tying so many necessary actions to stick buttons (the tank controls are not terrible on their own but still awkward). the mercury crash move required for the final boss (which requires both aiming yourself as a projectile in 3D and clicking both sticks in simultaneously while already in the air) is truly where I snapped on this.

it's a real shame too, because the boost mechanics are genuinely interesting and add some much needed flavor to an otherwise bland experience. while moving vertically expends fuel, boosting in the x-y plane is virtually free for the initial portion, and the game encourages you to spam alternating boosts to charge your special gauge and power up your weapons. the sense of speed you get from drifting across rocks like they're ice or flying across a giant map in seconds is absolutely the crux of this experience as a whole, and it's relatively glitch-free to boot. it's unfortunate that most of the platforming requires expending most of the fuel slowly flying up to reach platforms that seem placed to frustrate players getting used to the odd controls. it also does not help that stopping mid-boost requires snapping back on the analog stick, which often does not register properly resulting in either a full-speed fall or a misaligned hover.

the actual shooting mechanics are relatively downplayed thanks to there being only two guns, infinite ammo, and more than a smidge of auto-aim. most of the actual gameplay instead consists of panning the limited camera around waiting for a target enemy out of range to finally snag on your lock-on since around half of the missions consist only of clearing out all enemies in an area. the other ones generally just involve reaching a destination or defeating a mini-boss, which makes even bothering to fight basic enemies pointless. even with the game's extremely short runtime there's quite a bit of level reuse over the 14 missions, and the first two bosses also get reused multiple times each. thankfully for the most part of the bosses are manageable (outside of the final boss) but given the total lack of circle strafing I would hesitate to call them "fun" per se.

thinly layered on top of all of this is a rather odd story that mixes body horror and steampunk on the surface of an alien planet; at least, this is what I gathered from the optional in-game lore, which is entirely text-only and does not really make its way into the story. the off-screen villain dr. hubble seems legitimately unnerving and disturbed from the documents he leaves behind, but since he's never seen - beyond some bizarre infant creations that would make drakengard blush - I couldn't tell you one way or the other how effective he is as an antagonist. the game stirs up some pawed-at philosophy bits with a sort of mysticism DNA splicing thing, but it's so poorly integrated with the gameplay that to even dissect it seems not worth the trouble. all of the mutated colonists you kill ad nauseum throughout the story are somehow turned back to their normal selves in the end, and I get the feeling that most of the swarms of arachnid-adjacent monsters you take on are just random aliens unmentioned by the game's narrative anyway. and no, even by the end I didn't understand why there was a whale in the gunvalkyrie logo.

if anything this game feels extremely rushed, likely because of the mid-stream development shift to the xbox. it does make me wonder how the dreamcast would have handled the game's expansive level geometry (which I might add has the interesting functionality of having scalable area walls at points, though this is extremely poorly managed by the game's physics engine, which already struggles enough with moving the player up slopes) but then again the dreamcast did not have click-in sticks so I imagine earlier prototypes played significantly differently regardless. at best this game is a brainless shooter with mildly interesting traversal features, and at its worst it frustrates the player or forces them to wade through filler that really does not belong in a game this slight. so many levels on which I considered abandoning the game altogether, although I suppose I'm glad I waited it out.