Welcome to our review of one of the meanest looking games on Switch, Gunhouse!
Load your guns! Rain death from above! Protect your valuable orphans! Defeat giant, improbable bosses! Gunhouse is part puzzle, part active tower defense, as you make big combos to launch a hail of bullets and special attacks at the alien invaders who would like nothing better than to consume your delicious orphan friends. With infinite levels (you can play this *forever*), upgradeable weapons, hardcore mode, a unique art style, and music by Fez composer Disasterpeace, Gunhouse from Necrosoft Games will entertain the heck right out of you, maybe!
And maybe is the right way to describe this game, ranging from a rather difficult puzzle to a rather elaborate tower defense part, this game perfectly combines 2 genres but it does have some caveats along the way.
The puzzle side is all about making combos and filling up the weapons as soon as possible and preferably as powerful as possible too. Form a square and load up the weapon, slide the combo into either a direct weapon or a more ranged one from above, this is done by sliding em left to make it a more direct weapon and right for the “from above” approach.
Making those combos turned out to be rather hard in the beginning of the game, not once did I seem to just make a lot of them in the limited time frame I had in between the attacks from the enemies, introducing the tower defense part… After a small amount of time, the gates of the gunhouse slowly close and you need to defend yourself with the gathered weapons.
As you are attacked, the enemies try to take the orphans away, but as long as you attack them properly, they will return to your base. Not just this side recovers itself, but also the hearts you have, they too will refill themselves as you defeat incoming enemies. The difficulty raises along the way and well, it is not an easy game, to begin with. Luckily I almost always managed to scrape by along the way but never did I really have that one feeling of being great at it.
I love and play puzzle games the entire time, but Gunhouse… Sigh… I could not get into it, I just could not. I played more than I usually would, upgrading my weapons just to see if it would slowly become more playable, but sadly I did not have this impression.
I would like to say that prior to my conclusion, I would suggest looking up this game on a stream or a play video up on one of the many video platforms out there. This game has some very awesome graphics and based on these alone, I originally wanted to play this game. I would also recommend finding a clip where the host talks about how he plays and not just a speechless one. In my humble opinion, this will benefit your impression of the game.
In conclusion, I think I said pretty much everything I wanted to say, for me, this game is not a success story, far from even. The tutorial itself felt a little messy and it may have been the reason for my initial dislike of the game.
My rating stands at 60%
