Following from my review yesterday on The Binding of Issac, I decided that there was another rougelike Indie game that also needs just a little bit of love – Enter the Gungeon.

This lovely little indie title, similar to is a top-down rougelike bullet hell shooter created by Devolver Digital, that acts in many ways like The Binding of Issac; Enter the Gungeon, however holds a number of detailed differences that distance the two quite reasonably, enough to say that if you don’t like one, then you’ll most certainly like the other. Enter the Gungeon sticks truer to the rougelike formula than Issac does, through an enhanced difficulty, wider array of simple to use items, and more of a focus on resource management, decision making, and risk assessment.

 

Enter the Gungeon contains a plethora of differing environments, including dark mines, trapped royal corridors, blistering blacksmith forges and much, much more, with an overarching plot that ties in with every one of the four playable characters’ backstories – The main characters are people that are running away from their pasts, and have been tasked with facing their origins through the use of the Bullet That Can Kill the Past, a mythical bullet that has the power to erase the past of a person so they can move on with their lives.

Along the way you’ll encounter a wide variety of opponents and bosses, all named and designed after a type of “Gun-Pun” (I.E. a massive snake boss named ‘Ammoconda’ or a medusa-styled boss called ‘Gorgun’)…I have to warn you, if you’re not a fan of puns, especially bad ones, then I’d be well prepared for an onslaught of bad humour! These bosses provide an abnormally large difficulty spike, with some bosses being downright unfair to fight, such as the Kill Pillars and High Priest bosses.

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During your descent into the Gungeon, you’ll find a variety of powerups, curses, blessings, weapons and equipment to utilize, each with a massive range of effects, projectiles and capabilities to explore, with well over 200 items, weapons and abilities able to be collected; this, whilst shared with The Binding of Issac, is one of the things that keeps the game fresh and entertaining, with each run playing out differently from the rooms, weapons, enemies and even bosses that you can face being generated for each different run.

The game also, thankfully, comes with a fully fledged co-op mode too! Whilst The Binding of Issac did have a co-op mode, it was buggy, impractical and downright just shoved in, to be honest; Enter the Gungeon thankfully avoids these issues, as it’s co-op mode is far more stable, usable and useful when compared to The Binding of Issac. To be honest, though, you’ll probably need a friend to get through the first few floors initially too! The difficulty is, without a doubt, up to the Rougelike genre’s standards, whereas The Binding of Issac could be considered as more of a ‘Casual Roguelike’, Gungeon is here with one objective, and one objective only.

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To kick. Your. Ass. Simple as that!

I’ve been playing The Binding of Issac for over a year now, and Enter the Gungeon for around 2 months, and the game still, to this day, can kick my ass on the second floor. If you want to get into Gungeon, be prepared to treat it like a Souls game, since you’ll be dying over, and over, and over, AND OVER again…

All in all, Enter the Gungeon is an enjoyable little indie game in a similar vein to The Binding of Issac, yet is different enough to be set apart from it’s counterpart in many ways – The difficulty, the variety, and the god-damn puns are more than enough to satiate any Binding of Issac naysayers, and will keep you challenged for over 30 hours or more!

I would rate Enter the Gungeon an 8.5 / 10.

If you’re interested in seeing us Livestream Enter the Gungeon, or The Binding of Issac, please, let us know down in the comments! We’re always open to suggestions, and would be more than happy to give it a go!!