Gunbrella (Switch)
A gunbrella sounds like the kind of wacky weaponry you would find in a game that’s happily embracing oddball violence, but in the action platformer Gunbrella, it’s actually one of the few whimsical touches in an otherwise rather dour world. The places you explore in Gunbrella are often heavily polluted and will have ties to things like a cult that engages in human sacrifice, only little bits of levity sometimes found when you eavesdrop on conversations, but even the people who use gunbrellas are often deeply serious or needlessly cruel. Dark but not outright bleak, it starts to make you wonder why there are even gunbrellas in this world at all.
Gunbrella begins with the main character immediately experiencing tragedy, his wife killed and daughter taken while he was out gathering mushrooms. While you play as an almost silent man who looks a bit like a cowboy, the world he’s in seems to lean more industrial. With freighter ships and a junkyard with magnets and machine gun turrets, there is inevitably some intentionality revealed to this specific mix of tech. While our hero is on a very simple revenge quest to find the man whose gunbrella was left at the scene of the crime and reintroduce it to him quite violently, the world’s state ends up making up more of the story, your character a drifter running into different characters at different states in their lives and watching how the the dreary societies and dark factors at play twist them into new people. You do get to play a bit of a part in how certain characters grow too, some moments letting you make choices that don’t alter the grander narrative but can lead to some people outright dying or succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. The game does feature an alternate ending that requires you take an odd unstated third option to see and it’s not a very reasonable one to intuit either, but both normal endings work and contain the same core messages to cap off a tale that seems primarily concerned with the state of this game’s world and the people inhabiting it.
The gunbrella you use to fight and explore is initially a very simple weapon, more a combination of a shotgun and a shield that doesn’t let you fire when the defenses are up. The shotgun blasts can only be fired so fast and only travel so far, meaning you’ll often need to get in close enough for your weapon to do its work. The shielding effect of popping open the umbrella does protect from most dangers, meaning even as you are jeopardizing your safety getting in close, you can possibly protect yourself. It does protect a fair bit of your body when deployed, but angling it is important in more involved fights or against more flighty foes like Gorehounds who leap about wildly when trying to attack you. You start with only a bit of health, most health expansions payoffs to the side quests where you decide how to interact with the characters you meet, but you umbrella can deflect gunfire which can help with some foes. Despite the danger the game is urging you to put yourself in though, Gunbrella remains a surprisingly manageable experience, most bosses that pack a punch including easily learned patterns and fighting your way through areas usually pushing you to master your movement options rather than your combat skills.
Your umbrella can also be used for a dash, including a mid-air burst that can then transition into a slow descent if you hold it open, and while it’s nifty to find applications where it helps you navigate your way around danger, it’s also not put to the test that often despite there being occasional secrets to reward you for using it well. Gunbrella is around an 8 hour journey if you poke around for extras that sees you traveling to a good range of locations, but rarely do many of them really explore what the umbrella’s movement functions can do. In fact, it takes up until a processing plant fairly close to the finale for abilities like hooking onto ziplines to travel to be much more than a way to get around. The processing plant’s moving machinery and plentiful enemies and turrets ask you to do things quickly yet with some precision. You need to identify when to leap off a line or can make use of slowing your descent to buy you extra time to avoid danger, but this sudden emphasis on platforming almost feels like a one time thing, even the subsequent mountain climb feeling like it tones it down a touch as Gunbrella afraid to pressure you during most moments of traversal.
Combat undergoes a similar stagnation as well. While the give and take of a regular encounter means there’s still some energy to normal exploration, the game starts giving you more ammo options and yet doesn’t know how to integrate them too well. The rifle shots give you a long range way to harm enemies but you can carry so little at once and need to be so precise that sniping a pesky foe instead of facing them is more trouble than charging in to use the infinite shotgun shells you have. A mine shot and bouncing bladed disc also feel a bit underpowered when swapping ammo types can leave you in a bind if they’re not working well or you used up their limited ammo too quickly, and since everything feels like it’s made to handle a shotgun-only run anyway, it seems almost better to stick with defaults most of the time. The flamethrower ammo funnily enough has the inverse problem; if you have a good bit of ammo for it you can roast even late-game bosses without much trouble. Sticking to the shotgun ends up most rewarding since it never gets fiddly nor does it invalidate bosses who might not even get to show off all their attacks if you stocked up at the store on relevant ammo, money certainly abundant once you start selling the parts that break off the mutated monsters that are often in your path.
THE VERDICT: Gunbrella puts a lot of thought into its setting, but not nearly as much into its gameplay or even how you’ll use its namesake weapon. Many mechanics feel undercooked and only partially explored, a section like the processing plant abruptly realizing the platforming potential of the gunbrella only for things to calm back down and sometimes give way too much to storytelling over action. The dark world constructed to host this revenge tale does serve up interesting lore and scenarios even if the lead doesn’t engage much with it, but climactic and meaningful encounters also lose some punch due to your weapon’s effectiveness being strangely skewed. New battle options are often not worth the effort compared to blasting things with the tried and true shotgun shells, but at least that battle style involves having to get into the thick of things so the action, while not that difficult, remains involved enough to carry Gunbrella to the conclusion of its clearly prioritized plot.
And so, I give Gunbrella for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. The world-building eats up most of the game’s attention in Gunbrella, the game not necessarily story-focused but it’s very clear that’s where the development team’s heart truly lies. There is a compelling evolution to the world, some of your early efforts foiling Cult 45’s sacrificial efforts still having unexpected knock-on effects in places you didn’t expect. It’s a reactive world, one helped along by the fact you have a part in some of the meaningful choices, and while the broader course of the story won’t shift, there can still be a tinge of regret if you lead to someone’s future going awry since just enough time is spent to make you interested in the characters you come across. The music and pixel art establish the tone well, but then when you stop talking and start shooting, it starts feeling a little like the game can’t think up many new ways to challenge your weaponry. Every now and then the game pushes back a bit, the scrapyard introducing foes who move around a lot more despite your umbrella being quite vital for blocking their shots, and the processing plant is a true highlight of the game because understanding the umbrella’s movement features could have been used for so much more. But then things get pulled back, possibly because the game doesn’t seem to think a place less complex than a factory could have such involved movement or that the enemies ahead should be as dangerous as those you faced before. It moves on from its moments of expected escalation by dialing things back, the fundamentals still sound enough to keep you occupied but you will come to understand the flow of Gunbrella’s combat and be able to slip into it to the point the opposition can be handled with ease.
The fast moving plot that shows a changing world and lays down some interesting mysteries does mean that even when Gunbrella’s action sinks into simplicity you won’t lose interest in it, but the action doesn’t scale properly to reflect the growing danger or your point in the plot. Sections lose their oomph because the game seems reticent to demand too much expertise with your gunbrella and the new ammo types can’t bring variety to compensate because they are too limited compared to your tried and true brolly. While I’d say Gunbrella seems to be a concept bigger than the creator’s imagination, it feels more like more thought was put into a place’s plot importance and how it fits into the world. Gunbrella’s gunbrella almost seems out of place and not able to thrive despite the few moments things do click, the elaborate setting not built the best for your weird weapon’s range of abilities.