I have gladly welcomed the surge in roguelite FPS games flooding the Steam marketplace lately. Whether it’s Deadzone Rogue, Abyssus, or Voidbreaker, leveraging my twitch reflexes and longstanding prowess in battle arenas with a sense of regular progression and diversity in runs is a treat. So, throw in a cyberpunk, anti-AI aesthetic, and I’m all for it after hearing about Gunstoppable. This iteration sees you take it to the robots in a quest to save your sister and the planet Earth itself. Can this title hang with the rest of the pack?

Right off the bat, Gunstoppable shows that its gimmick in the roguelite FPS field is high movement speed. Your damage output is boosted when you’re grappling, sliding, grinding rails, or wall-running. As such, you’ll be incentivized to do just that as much as possible, with the added caveat that you’re dodging enemy projectiles in the process. It’s a bit odd that there’s no sprint functionality, so the base max speed comes off as feeling a bit slow in comparison with most modern FPS. In addition, even with all these movement options, you’re really going to have to kite AND put stock into slowing enemy projectile speed to stay alive.

If movement itself doesn’t give you the edge in Gunstoppable, your regular upgrades and augments will. Not only can you buff your weaponry, but you’ll also be able to persist with health upgrades, enemy debuffs, and everything in between. Permanent upgrades between runs give you a head start, but you’ll feel more of the effects with the run upgrades. You’re going to need them, as a lot of the guns feel like peashooters with base stats. My winning combo was the pistol/assault rifle, as the shotgun/rocket launcher felt miserable in my hands. It was funny to see a banana boomerang gun, but its paltry range also felt like a waste.

The biggest pain point in Gunstoppable is its minuscule scale. I reached the final boss on my second run, and took him out on my third, with the majority of the permanent upgrades left untouched. With no replayability due to limited weaponry/upgrades, I called it a day there. There’s nothing here that can’t be experienced in Roboquest or Metal Eden. Nonetheless, it’s CAGE Studios’ first crack at a game, it’s solo-developed, and it’s at a small price point. So, comparisons aside, it’s still a novel attempt and a decent starting point for the creator.

If you can bear some cringe-inducing voice acting, want an aim-trainer for movement-based shooters, or just need a cheap FPS fix, Gunstoppable may be for you. It’s familiar waters for a diehard like me, and could benefit from some fine-tuning in its balancing. However, the dev patched the demo a whopping twenty-six times, so I have no doubt the game can only get better from this point. At launch, it’s hard to recommend, but I hope to see some improvements from CAGE Studios.

A PC review copy of Gunstoppable was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Gunstoppable

$9.99

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Decent Movement
• Solid Soundtrack

Cons

• Can Beat in an Hour
• Painstaking Voice Acting
• Several Guns are Awful