The objective of the game is not kill the enemy by depleting their health, but by throwing the enemy off the stage. This concept is akin to the Super Smash Bros mechanics.The game is innovative, and is quite fun to play. In order to throw a player out of the screen one must position himself, through jumps and platform drops, in a way that the opponent cannot fire him first, since there is a delay between the time a shot is fired and the time a player is hit, this makes for very interesting gameplay. Players can pick up weapons and upgrades that randomly fall on the screen and add something to the gameplay. Additionally, players start with bombs, which are dropped on the spot, and provide huge knockback to players standing by.The graphics of the game are decent for a pixel art game, the characters are simply drawn and come in a wide variety, the player’s avatar is customisable, which is a plus. The backgrounds deserve complements, they are drawn in an naive artistic style, they realistically simulate parallax (the effect of distance through point of view motion) and are definitely the strong point of the graphics. The GUI is weird, but the icons are nicely drawn.
Regarding gameplay, this game is were it is supposed to shine, the idea behind it and the developer behind it would make you expect that the graphics be the low budget pixel art it is, but the gameplay should be where the game excels. In a sense it is, the idea is good, there is potential for expanding, but the gameplay feels kind of incomplete.The AI is surprisingly good, it is not very profound, but it plays well, it doesn’t crash, or get stuck, or suicide. I enjoyed playing the first few levels against the AI.The game plays nicely until a bug occurs, which happens quite often, there are a lot of places where collision is faulty and you go through floors. Additionally, the game doesn’t handle it well when 2 players overlap, it’s just confusing because you cannot shoot your enemy. One mission even requires you spam bombs enough to slow the game down, which is a serious bug.One of the main gameplay faults of Gun Mayhem 2 is clarity; it is very hard for the user to understand the mechanics, if it weren’t for my familiarity with Super Smash Bros, I probably wouldn’t have understood the concept strategy, and some game mechanics have effects which are hard to recognize, for example sometimes we see we are knockbacked, but we don’t know how. Some mechanics are simply never explained, I believe that combos increase knockback, but sometimes they don’t, specifically, it is never explained how some shots from the same gun are more powerful than other shots from the same gun.Lastly, I feel that the gameplay mechanics could have been better, but the developer decided to spend time on other aspects of the game that did not contribute much to the actual base gameplay, like perks, customisation and to an extent excess weapons and upgrades (which contribute to the gameplay, but not in a way that an overhaul of the gameplay mechanics could have done.) But it’s a fair trade-off that might have made the game more enjoyable for many people, so I will just list it as a developing constraint. So I will only say that the game has room to expand and improve.In conclusion, this game is a nice game to play for 15 minutes,with or without friends to play with. Its bugs and lack of clarity are the only real problem with the game for that purpose.
play now: gunmayhem2.co