Enter the Gungeon is a solid game, to be sure. There's a lot of difficulty, replay-ability, and items to play around with. The whole time I was playing, though, I couldn't help but think of how INSANELY similar this game is to Binding of Isaac, but how I'd rather be playing that game instead, considering the general experience is about the same. Enter the Gungeon seems to have had the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to game design, and it had a little less cohesion as a result. If you get this game on sale, you'd probably have a fine time playing it. It's fun. There's just better Rogue-types out there.
I'm not even trying to be a contrarian, I'm well aware of how beloved this game is, but man is it overrated. The hitscan is unlike any other game I've ever played (the closest thing I might compare the BS-levels to is maybe Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl). There's challenging, then there's just annoying BS. This game does have cool atmosphere, for sure, and an interesting arsenal that mixes things up, but man is the difficulty insane. And no, just because a game is outrageously difficult, does not make it good. I had much more fun playing Shadow Warrior and Duke 3D on the second highest difficulty than I did playing this on the third highest difficulty. Overrated and infuriatingly difficult.
2 things to start off: 1) I REALLY wanted to love this game. 2) I still recommend it based on price, concept, and amount of game alone. I watched a Sseth video, wanted to try it for myself, and while promising at the start, the frustrating and clunky aspects of the game really started to wear down on me. Once again, the price point on this game is awesome, as well as the amount of potential gameplay. I also love the concept of this game, kind of like a proto-fantasy-themed total war. You get some story missions, as well as the meat of the game, which is a campaign mode with 8 distinct races that all play differently, as well as three "hero" options (do you want to use magic, stealth, or raw power as an early game crutch?) to play around with. However, there are gamebreaking bugs that do make at least one of the 8 races unplayable (the Chaos Barbarians), which you WILL need to hunt down an unofficial patch for if you want to fix. That's kind of ridiculous, to be fair. Then there's the grueling pace mixed with the overbearing penalties for losing units or battles in the early game, making an absolute need to reload battles until you get near perfection (in the clunky combat with insanely bad pathfinding) which feeds back into the grueling pace where you need to grind early on and burn through turns to amass followers. That's just the beginning, since all of that^ feeds into my main gripe which is the control. This is insanely counterintuitive. The right and left mouse buttons just feel like they should be reversed, and everything just kind of "sticks". It's hard to deselect units, it's hard to select just one or multiple units when you want to, you have to keep re-giving commands, and you keep having to fix commands given to the wrong units. This feeds back into the "overbearing penalty" problem, since the smallest mistake will wreck you, making you need to reload which drags the game out even further MAN this game has so much potential though. Really frustrating
I just can't comprehend how people sincerely give this game so much praise with levels as infuriating and frustrating as these. At least with the original Doom, only E3 and E4 get frustrating, but the first episode is legendary and episode 2 is still pretty great. This though... ugh. Apparenly this one dude Sandy Petersen made most of the levels and he's notorious for gimmicky level design. Idk, just dissappointing coming to this game from Ultimate Doom. I guess get this game if you want to mess with custom WADs, as there are many. But THAT'S what the appeal is, playing this game for mods and custom campaigns and maps. The game the developers released? Not good, it sincerely pains me to say. From what I can tell, most of the people praising 2 over 1 grew up with 2, but even most of them admit 1 has better levels. Well, you do get a lot of levels with this release, combined with Final Doom. But even so, ONLY buy this release if you want to mess with some cool mods and custom campaigns. NOT if you are expecting a better base campaign than Ultimate Doom.
This is one super immersive game. The gunplay is awesome, the setting is awesome, and if you like exploration adventure RPGs, this fills that craving. It's like a more first person shooter-y Fallout, to give a rough example. Before I get into the flaws, which should prevent ANYONE from giving this game a 5-star rating, I will say that the flaws can be mildly ammended via mods. The carry weight is abysmal. I'm all for an inventory weight limit, hell, I think the Fallout series is WAY too forgiving in that department, but this game is WAY too stingy with it. The whole setting of the game is where it's you an a bunch of scavengers trying to dig up ammo, food, and artifacts to survive and profit, so having to constantly drop stuff or make LONG trips back to the shop to sell stuff really bog the game down. Then there's the story, which I had a hard time trying to follow. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I usually don't have such a difficult time in other games I play. There's also the quest system. You have STRICT time limits on optional quests, which prevent you from taking them unless you ONLY set out with JUST that side mission in mind, and even then sometimes the quest markers bug out or don't go away. Lastly the difficulty. I couldn't finish the game. I got to Pripyat, which is about 80% through, before it just didn't even seem worth the effort any more. The enemies become just too well armored to the point where gunshots to the face just mildly annoy them, they can shoot you through the level geometry which is some real BS, I have so little ammo for the situationally appropriate guns so I'm counting bullets like a jewish hitman, for every one enemy that I manage to down, two more pop up on my radar, and after save-scumming for a few hours straight, I just said "fak it." I bought the game for around $2, and considering the fun I had and the game's strong points, me feeling like giving the game anything less than 4-stars, all this^ considered should say a lot.
