Guns, Gore & Cannoli

 
Developer: Crazy Monkey Studios

Steam Release: Apr 2015

Hours Played: 8.4

Similar To: Creepy Road / Final Exam / Rocketbirds / Shoot Many Robots / Zombie Kill of the Week

Rating: 5/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY

GG & C may be a run and gun action platformer about a ruthless Italian gangster with a penchant for fancy pastries and an insatiable hunger to execute zombies but it's also a platformer dripping with class and quality. You'll notice this when you first fire it up and behold the graphics of crisp clarity. We're talking of the detailed hand-drawn quality in gorgeous HD! You play as Vinnie Cannoli who makes his way through a series of 12 varied locations in the heart of gangster-land in a fictional US city - much like New York - while gunning down a plethora of zombies. You'll pick up ammo for your stash of guns and chomp your way through well-placed cannoli for a health-kick along the way... and it all plays out beautifully!

BALANCE & PACE

Although wanton destruction is certainly on the menu, this is no platformer you can just charge through with gay abandon like a Shoot Many Robots or a Serious Sam Double D XXL. For one, ammo is not dished out like confetti and although you get armed with a basic pistol with infinite ammo by default, this alone won't be enough to take down the volley of zombies who'll be comin' at ya. Wise use of power-house weapons such as the flame-thrower and rocket launcher need to be considered, as well as when to use those close-range shotguns or that revolver. The weaker Tommy gun, unleashing a faster rate of fire, gets thrown into the mix as well. It's all put together so tightly that the balance of switching between these weapons, conserving ammo and making sure you hit your target to inflict maximum damage becomes an art.  
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN 

There is no aiming with the right-stick here; your character simply fires in a straight horizontal line, so with the help of sloping paths and stairs, it's about lining up your character to hit targets square in the face... and landing a well-timed hit always feels good. Making the player feel like a boss is what all platform shooters should do and along with the likes of Broforce and Badass Hero, GG & C succeeds in this regard. Again, the locked and loaded sound of reloading and the firing of your rounds helps with this but the sheer destruction and the shedding of blood you inflict adds to it. With suitable music from 1920s American culture and plenty of comical asides uttered by our man Vinnie, the game does a great job in immersing you in the action.
   

PROGRESS SYSTEM

The game is laid out in the form of a 12-chapter campaign with each lasting around 15-20 minutes or so. Be prepared to negotiate pretty tough areas in some. The level-select screen invites you to replay chapters. Underneath the thumbnails for these are listed the four difficulty levels you can play. A welcome feature is that each one (easy, normal, hard or insane) has a nice green tick next to it if you managed to clear it at that difficulty, adding to its replayability. Personally the easy and normal difficulties supplied me with a suitable enough challenge and the right pitch when it came to gameflow. Additionally there is a kind of skirmish option named Versus mode, that's packed with customization, where you can bound around on one screen battling against four opponents.  

CONCLUSION

At the fair fee of £6.99, GG & C is worth it at twice the price. For graphics quality and gameplay alone the game nails it but you'll also want to pick it up for its all-round atmosphere and the variety of kooky characters you can exterminate. From hysterical screaming nutcases, World War 2 soldiers from the trenches (packed with an extroardinary amount of hit-points), ghouls and vampires, huge beefy butchers built like brick shithouses to lunatics that explode in a cloud of poisonous toxic gas - you'll encounter them all. This game has a very strong standing in my catalogue of action platformers rivaling Broforce itself in the category marked as violent and fast-paced platform shooters. This one deserves its place in the top drawer and, of course, check out the sequel!