880th played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Gameboy Advance
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Sega/THQ
So we played Gunstar Heroes as game… oh, 140 on the blog, some 740 games and at least seven and a half years ago. It actually still have some purple text in its write up! Now I’ll be honest and say that at this point, it has merged in my memory with plenty of other run and gunners, so I won’t try to draw out too many comparisons at this point. I have played a lot more Treasure games since though, with at least two more on the way (one of which I can now promise to have appear within ten games of this write up), and while Stretch Panic is an exception, games like Sin and Punishment still are in the similar area.
Just as there are over seven years between me playing the original game and this sequel, the two games were published twelve years apart and just as my writing hasn’t gotten much better in the intervening years, it feels like this sequel hews close enough to the original already. If nothing else, I’d expect that much from a sequel like this and how it’d build on nostalgia. A weird thing to say considering this game is now fifteen years old, but that’d what we get from this blog going on for this long.
Our Thoughts
To take out the initial concern I had, this game doesn’t shower you with choice, instead just offering you the choice between two playable characters, Red and Blue. They both have different weapon sets – nothing overly different, but just enough to make Blue feel a bit more controlled and Red a bit more reckless. You take each through the same levels, although the path of each character seems to be tracked separately in the save game – I think it’s just a convenience, with no differences otherwise.
Otherwise, this is another show that takes you through a long level, infiltrating a base, killing loads of enemies and going back out, or shooting others while you’re on top of a plane. It’s confident enough in this that it doesn’t give much of an introduction on what to do – I guess the manual would have said more about the controls – and the story introduction feels as generic as can be. This extends to the the bosses, were nothing is telegraphed and I felt confused on what to do to beat them – and quite surprised when they suddenly appeared. I felt lost playing the game, which wasn’t great. The story itself, aside from being generic, lost some of the humour we enjoyed in the original storyline.
Final Thoughts
At this point, I must admit I struggle to see what this game offers over the original. Yeah, it’s a decent shooter, doing all the standard run and gun stuff, but there’s nothing here that I’m feeling in it. I guess this clearly wasn’t for me, but perhaps the same thing happened a bit too often here.