the-buyers-guide-blog

[the-buyers-guide-blog]

GoNNER: The Buyer’s Guide

Released: 12/10/16 (PC), Raw Fury Platforms: Windows, Nintendo Switch Developer: Art at Heart Cost: 10$ (USD)

The video version of this review can be found HERE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBw80Zfb_Jg&t=182s

BUY IF: You’re a perma-death junkie, you buy games on the basis of art design or you’re happy to shell out ten dollars on an enjoyable five hour experience WAIT FOR A SALE IF: You like fully randomized gameplay DON’T BUY IF: You’re looking for something meaty to hold your interest for dozens of hours or you’re easily frustrated While you’re in the area, why not try: Downwell - http://store.steampowered.com/app/360740/Downwell/ Tumbleseed - http://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/ Some neat little games from Ditto, GoNNER’s developer - https://ditto.itch.io/

Perhaps the unkindest thing you could say about GoNNER is that it’s a tech demo for a bigger game. For a genre that boasts masses of randomized content, this particular rogue-lite is extremely light on the kind of variables that ensure replayability – weapons, power-ups and (in GoNNER’s case) snazzy backpacks and detachable heads. GoNNER is a beautiful, satisfying and chaotic platforming-shooter with randomly generated levels and enemy placement. It bears only tangential resemblance to other games in the nebulous rogue-lite genre, but is perhaps most readily comparable with 2015’s Downwell. The player assumes the role of Ikk, a drop of water, who goes on a quest to help his friend, a sad looking whale named Sally. If this sounds like the setup of a picture book for particularly simple children, it probably won’t be a surprise to hear that the plot is mostly perfunctory, and yet the character design is charming and the limited story told well enough through visual narrative. 

The simplicity of GoNNER’s gameplay hinges on two basic elements, movement and loadout.

Ikk has a variety of movement options: he can move horizontally, jump, double jump, slide down and climb up walls (à la Mega Man X), bounce off enemies, and boost himself by firing certain weapons against adjacent surfaces. The game places a huge focus on momentum and chaining together kills to earn the game’s currency and de-facto life bar (glyphs), but also as a way of maximising the player’s score, so I was a little disappointed to find that I never felt like I was moving particularly quickly outside of combat – continuing with the Megaman inspiration, a simple slide dash would have made an appreciable difference to the player’s sense of speed.

In rushing from one engagement to the next, hoping to keep up my chain, I frequently ran into situations where the game’s randomly generated stages and Ikk’s slightly stilted manoeuvrability made it impossible for me to continue my combo. Movement is for the most part fluid and responsive, but it still feels limited for the kind of game GoNNER aspires to be. Special mention must be made of GoNNER’s bizarre and unwieldy keyboard controls, which wouldn’t be a problem, except they can’t be remapped (as of the time of writing). Playing with a gamepad seems to be the intended control option, and I found the Nintendo Switch version to be greatly preferable to having movement mapped to the arrow keys and actions locked to Z, X and Y.

GoNNER’s load-out system exposes one of the game’s most severe problems.

Ikk can carry three items: a head, which grant a variety of benefits such as extra health or a triple jump, a backpack, which are active-use items with a short cool-down, and one of seven guns. Between these three categories, there are around twenty items to choose from, a very limited pool of combinations and synergies. What makes the limited item variety particularly problematic is that a few items are so much better than the others that you’ll often feel obliged to use the same combination (the shotgun, hardhead and the reload was my go-to) because they’re unequivocally better than the others, and the game does little to reward changing up your play-style. 

The reload backpack in particular stood out to me as a baffling bit of game design – ammo is a resource, dropped by enemies on death, and running out of ammo could force a player into engaging enemies via alternate means, or risk sacrificing their kill streak. And yet the reload kit is unlockable from the start, has essentially no cool-down, and renders the entire ammo drop system moot with the inexhaustible press of a button. I didn’t even realise that the game sought to encourage ammo conservation, because I became so accustomed to automatically restoring it. When I eventually unlocked other kits, I used them for maybe a run or two, but quickly found myself unwilling to abandon the familiar for something largely inferior for the sake of game balance or variety.

Hardhead, the first unlockable, alleviated my biggest problem with GoNNER’s gameplay – when Ikk takes damage, he drops everything (head, pack and gun) and must scramble to recollect his equipment. If he takes damage without a head, it’s game over, irrespective of remaining health. Interesting in theory though this may be, I frequently found myself dying in ways I found unfair. The head is too small, and often too similar in colour to other objects to be readily discernable. Although the player is given a three second invincibility window, hitting the jump key will cause Ikk to reform and be susceptible to all forms of damage, forcing the player to play ultra-conservatively and in doing so, breaking the run-and-jump flow of the game. In my first ten runs, nine of my deaths came from taking damage while headless. When I worked out that hardhead remedied this complaint by getting rid of this system entirely, I opted for it almost exclusively – other heads had useful gimmicks, but I was more than happy to forgo a triple jump in favour of not having runs cut arbitrarily short by bad head placement.

The guns, for their part, are extremely satisfying to use. The laser and the shotgun were particularly tactile, and made mowing down rooms of enemies a real joy. There’s less of a dichotomy between useful and not useful (excluding the feeble starting rifle), and although I preferred particular weapons to others, this was one of the few aspects of GoNNER that I thought promoted varied gameplay and different approaches to tackling more-or-less identical challenges. The game is beautiful: I loved the way platforms were illuminated and disappeared as Ikk approached them, the changes to the colour palette as the player built up a chain of kills, and the whole design of the game’s third and penultimate world. Aside from the issue with the discarded head highlighted above, the game does an excellent job of letting the player know whether something is friendly or hostile through colour coding. Even amidst the stark minimalism of the third world’s white backdrop, I was never in any doubt as to what I was meant to shoot. The music is similarly exquisite, ambient and haunting, and I particularly liked the soundtrack to the game’s load-out screen. Even after five hours with GoNNER, I continued to enjoy the understated electronic loop, although I’d more or less been listening to the same variation since I’d started playing. 

As is synonymous with the rogue-lite genre, GoNNER is difficult, but its difficulty is tempered by the game’s short length and predictability. Whereas the success or failure of a run in The Binding of Isaac can be determined by item rooms, enemy placement, or boss spawns, GoNNER leaves very little to chance. The same bosses spawn at the end of their respective levels, load-outs are pre-determined for the most part, and even the randomly generated stages feel very samey after a few play-throughs. Player skill and familiarity with particular items are valued above all else, and I welcomed the ‘hands off’ approach to player development. There was just enough enemy variety to keep combat interesting, but the enemy pool was not so diverse as to cloud the player’s expectation of any given stage.

 THE BOTTOM LINE:

I wish there was more to GoNNER than there is. There are some really terrific elements: a score system multiplied by a currency that can only be earned through player skill and momentum, an imaginative and dream-like setting, and an outstanding and distinct aesthetic. Yet the game’s innovative systems and tight gunplay are let down by an absolute dearth of content, poor balance, limited motivation for player experimentation, and crucially, a lack of replayability. I played four hours of the game on PC, by which time I was fairly certain I’d seen all the game had to offer. After another five or so hours on a new save file on the Nintendo Switch, I’d simply run out of things to do.

That being said however, GoNNER is, while it lasts, an addictive and enjoyable experience, and one that probably benefits from the Switch’s portability. This is the first commercial release from Art in Heart, a one-person studio, and ultimately there are far worse ways to spend ten dollars. GoNNER is available on Steam and the Nintendo eShop.  The game’s official website can be found here.