Dual Stick Shooters have become a very popular game category: MiniGore, Alive Forever, Meteor Blitz, to name just a few I’ve played before Guerilla Bob. It’s crowded enough that when I heard some of the positive buzz surrounding Guerilla Bob I was intrigued.
Visually the game looks great. It’s like a Looney Tunes cartoon from the mid 90′s but with guns, cigars, and a moustache. It has some sort of storyline about who Guerilla Bob is but I really didn’t give a shit, I was ready to jump in and shoot stuff. I had high expectations.
Armed at first with just a machine gun, Guerilla Bob eventually picked up a rocket launcher and flamethrower. Pretty standard fair for any action game but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Except that here, it broke.
From the get go you realize that your machine gun isn’t so much spewing bullets as it is spitting goo balls. It fires big balls of fire that are fairly slow and take 3-4 hits to kill a bad guy. Very anti-climactic, but I held out hope. The weapon power-ups sort of helped, instead of 3-4 shots enemies would drop in 2. Problem is that’s one too many when each shot travels at about the speed of a wiffel ball. It’s slow by design since half the time Guerilla Bob side steps the equally slow little circles that the bad guys shoot at you.
The rocket launcher feels like a different version of the machine gun. It shoots differently (and slower) and can penetrate the sand bags some enemies stand behind. But it still feels slow and uninteresting. The only weapon that didn’t piss me off completely was the flamethrower which due to its continuous fire allowed me to get in close and score the 3-5 hits it would take to kill an enemy rather quickly.
The various power ups are equally pointless. A speed power-up allows you to run around like you just did lines of coke off a Panamanian stripper’s ass but serves little purpose since you still have to dance around an enemy to score those 3-5 hits.
The games longevity is also questionable. Although the artwork is nice it’s also extensively recycled. Every single level looked and played the same. Eventually you unlock a survival mode which for me was pointless since I was usually relieved when I was done playing.
It’s ironic that the story links in with John Gore from MiniGore since that game does just about everything right that Guerilla Bob does wrong. MiniGore is fast paced, frantic, your bullets kill quickly, and weapon upgrades are worth a damn. Guerilla Bob paints such a pretty picture but ultimately proves to be rather forgettable.
Buy MiniGore instead.
