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Gatling Gears Review for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Gatling Gears Review for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Dual-Stick Shooting Goes Steampunk

There aren’t a whole lot of twin-stick top-down shooters on the market today, so fans of old hits like Smash TV have to take what they can get. Gatling Gears, a new downloadable indie game by Vanguard and Electronic Arts, is here to give fans of the genre something to do other than replay Geometry Wars again.

Unlike Geometry Wars and other similar games, Gatling Gears doesn’t have you play repetitive abstract stages over and over again. It actually has a story, which will make fans of the old NES top-down army shooters happy. You are Max Brawley, an old-timey fellow with an awesome moustache who defects from an evil empire, taking a two-legged walking Gatling gun robot with him. Long story short, it’s up to you to save the day in the only way you know how: by blowing up everything in the immediate vicinity. Good plan!

Gatling Gears Screenshot

The game starts off with a tutorial that takes you through the basics of the game. If you’ve ever played a twin-stick shooter before, you’ll catch on rather quickly. The left stick controls your bipedal Gatling gun mech, while the right stick controls where your mech is aiming.

You also have three secondary weapons to use in the middle of battle by pressing a shoulder button. Rockets do more damage but are harder to aim and usually only hit big targets. You have a limited amount at your immediate disposal, but your rocket supply regenerates over time. Grenades are even more powerful and do AOE splash damage. You can even manually chose where they will land from clear across the map, but you have an even more limited ammo supply and they regenerate even slower than rockets. Finally, you have a shockwave attack that can clear out the entire screen in a pinch. You only get one charge of this, so use it wisely.

As you wander through stages blasting the crap out of everything in your way, power-ups will drop. Unfortunately, this is probably the most uninspired part of the game. You’ll only find health pick-ups, invulnerability, damage-ups, and other very basic power-up items. They last for a limited time, and they never make much of a difference beyond granting you a few final seconds of invulnerability to stave off death a little longer.

Gatling Gears Screenshot

However, you can also find gold bars as you play through the game, and these can be traded in for upgrades at a shop at the beginning of each level. You can upgrade every weapon you own multiple times, as well as your mech’s speed, health, and other attributes. Upgrades can be traded back for the exact amount of gold you paid for them, so you can effectively re-upgrade your mech as much as you’d like. In fact, many stages will require you to do so. Sometimes it pays to have grenades with a wider splash radius rather than a better Gatling gun.

The stages in Gatling Gears are rather enjoyable. They constantly feed you new enemies in ever-changing patterns to keep you on your toes. In the beginning, you will just be fighting a few tanks and scattered handfuls of foot soldiers. However, as the game goes on, you’ll end up fighting helicopters, turrets, enemy robots, and more. Eventually, there are so many missiles on the screen you’ll think you’re in a bullet hell game. Though this is fun for the first few levels, it eventually gets a little frustrating because you do not have near the maneuverability required to dodge all of the bullets. Harder stages will simply require you to take hits or find invulnerability power-ups. This also makes health upgrades some of the most valuable upgrades in the game, so focus on those first.

Gatling Gears Screenshot

On the whole, Gatling Gears is fun, but if there is anything the game suffers from, it’s repetition. Eventually, the simple process of “move a screen, shoot some guys, lather, rinse, and repeat” starts to drag. This hits the hardest close to the beginning of the game when you don’t have a lot of upgrades, and in random points in the middle. The above-average stage length is the real culprit here. In a perfect world, long stages would be a good thing. However, as it stands, the game is just a bit too repetitive for this to be a positive feature.

Gatling Gears actually gets most of its replay value via online and offline co-op. When you drop into another player’s game, you retain all your upgrades. This is magnificent if, say, you have a fully tricked-out mech and your friend is stuck noobing it up on the first few levels. The game doesn’t actually change when you go into co-op mode, so you might notice that it becomes significantly easier. This isn’t really a bad thing, as those hits you just had to take before are now more avoidable when another mech has your back.

Gatling Gears Screenshot

The second way that Gatling Gears squeezes out some replay value is from its survival mode, which basically just tasks you with killing enemies before they overrun you. This is the only mode which the co-op difficulty drop actually hurts. I started it up to see how long I could go with a friend, and the conclusion was “effectively infinite.” No really, we just gave up eventually and turned the game off out of boredom.

Boredom is the one thing preventing Gatling Gears from being a perfect top-down shooter for a new generation. It has a really solid system built into a nice-looking environment with a decent story, and its only real downsides are the parts that drag. It’s easy to put the controller down when playing Gatling Gears, but it’s equally as easy to pick it right back up. A tiny bit more refinement and this could have been a smash indie hit.

Gatling Gears is a fifteen dollar game that I honestly got fifteen dollars’ worth of enjoyment out of. If anything, it’s the only new top-down shooter alternative out there, and it more than competes with Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD. In my opinion, you should give the game a whirl.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.9 Graphics
The game’s stages are visually interesting, but the sheer amount of bullets that can crowd the screen is what’s really impressive about the graphics engine. 4.2 Control
The game works just fine with the dual-stick control scheme that we have all come to know and love. 2.9 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The music is kind of uninspired and the sound is just repetitive explosions. Audio is the weakest part of the game. 3.7 Play Value
Though some stages drag on far longer than they should, the game is overall an enjoyable experience. 3.8 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Upgrade your mech and unleash hell with unique power-ups.
  • Test your skill against wave after wave of enemies in survival mode.
  • Seamless drop-in/drop-out co-op play makes Gatling Gears a blast to play with friends.

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