Sometimes you just want a game that doesn’t ask too much of you. It gives you a gun, gives you some simple objectives, and by way of obstacle unleashes a menagerie of mutated monstrosities to make minced meat from your, er… moustache. And what a cracking moustache it is, for Guntouchables sees you fielding four finger-shaped apocalypse survivors with some pretty gnarly facial hair between them. Except Linda, but she does have a nice hat.
Guntouchables is a top-down roguelike co-op shooter that puts you in control of the titular group and sends you out on missions with fairly simple parameters. Often you’ll be given the task of collecting a crate of beer, gathering loo roll, or harvesting tobacco from several fields. Levels are small and compact, easy to navigate, with icons on the minimap to highlight where you need to go. The challenge comes from the horde.
A meter will slowly fill at the top of the screen, which speeds up as you do certain things, and eventually unleashes a rampaging horde of mutants, zombies, monsters and bugs. Some are spewed from the ground, others just kind of spawn off-screen, and they come at you in scores. It’s not bullet hell, but it’s not far off. A secondary objective is to find crates hidden around the level, usually including some that are hidden within a small pocket level where you’ll need to survive a certain amount of time against overwhelming odds.
After each mission the crates you’ve collected will open to reveal three buff cards, which do things like boost your health or sprint speed, or increase the damage of your weapons and abilities. Each of the four main characters has a unique tool like Linda’s shovel or Marcus’s bone saw, which can help you survive in a pinch. You’ll also select a modifier card for each successive stage, which might give you a free shield or first aid kit, but will also buff the monsters in some way.
You spend cans of food you collect on weapons and upgrades, carrying two at any given time. These too can be modified, adding elemental damage, or faster reload speed. Because ammo and HP are very finite, you’ll often want to carry crates of the former and first aid kits around that you can bust out to help you and your allies.
And you will need allies. Some of the enemies have attacks that pin you, and even though you have a little drone that flies around with you and shoots things, its AI will often just freeze up and let you get mauled to death by a giant tick. It’s not helped by the fact that the game also kept glitching when this happened, and respawning me stuck in the “being mauled to death” animation. For such a simple game, Guntouchables has more than its fair share of bugs.
Although not a bug, the shooting is occasionally a little unruly. Sometimes you’ll line up what looks like a perfect shot using the twin-stick controls and it will just miss, and some of the weapons just don’t feel that responsive, but maybe that was me and my old reflexes. I certainly got more joy from shotguns than I did from any other weapon, although the assault rifles felt pretty good as a back up.
Even with friends, Guntouchables is better in short doses. It has a lot of weapons to unlock, sure, but there aren’t all that many strings to its bow. Tackling huge bosses can be a laugh, especially with a few modifiers turned on. Having a bunch of flaming zombies running at you while you spray the crowd with chain lightning takes a while to get old, and there’s a decent visual variety to the maps, even if the mechanics don’t change all that much. While it has a distinctly “madcap” sense of humour and a bone-dry cartoonish comedy that serves its post-apocalyptic setting, the fun comes from how frantic it is and your mileage may vary. While you absolutely can and will create a certain amount of carnage, there’s little in the way of emergent moments or synergy between the characters. It’s more a kind of zany hillbilly free-for-all. But you may be into that, no judgement.
That all said, of course, there’s something hugely cathartic about simple blasting and moving, throwing grenades and spraying fire, ice, and bullets with violent abandon. Guntouchables’ fast pace and silly humour is more than enough to keep you hooked, but until the devs patch a few things it really does require friends to get the most out of it.
