Gunlocked 2
Locked and bloated
Gunlocked 2, like its predecessor from a few years ago, is a solo-developed Survivors-like Euro-shmup with a bunch of options and no real end game. You fly a ship, blast apart enemy vessels and asteroids, collect the gems inside, and pick from a random set of choices for passive upgrades to unlock at level-up. The sequel strives to expand the game in dozens of little ways – more open screen real estate, more weapons, pilots, ships, and difficulty toggles, and flashier visuals in the same style.
One of the bigger changes to the format does more for the game’s playability than anything else, and that’s the stage selection between rounds. Every few minutes, you get two options for what the next zone will offer – what sorts of enemies you’ll face, what hazards will appear, what kind of rewards the mid-stage beacon challenge has, even which boss you have to fight. You can even reroll the beacon rewards, but the most important part of this feature is that it serves as a save point. You can finish a stage, save and quit at the selection screen, and resume the run later. It helps to not feel trapped in a run that might in reality take a good bit longer than the roughly 30 minute session promised by a Survivors-like, which was one of my problems with the original. Plus, having distinct enemy and hazard types that you consciously pick from does a little to give the stages more personality.
Another straightforwardly positive change is the addition of an optional, endless post-game. These games are all about piecing together a ‘build’ that scales well enough to keep up with an escalating deluge of enemies, and in most of these games, the key to victory is breaking the balance completely. If you fail to create an obscenely overpowered aura of DPS around you, you’re guaranteed to be overwhelmed by the last couple minutes and die, and if you do, the last few minutes mostly devolve into you looking at your phone while waiting for the timer to finish ticking down or pacing around slurping up thousands of gems as your eyes glaze over.
Gunlocked, however, is also a shmup, and so killing enemies is only half the battle, as you also need to constantly pay attention to dodge shots and shielded foes and clouds of debris. It also has a much smoother progression of power, both from the player and the stages, so even though the screen gets pretty cluttered and chaotic in the leadup to the last boss of a run, it’s nothing compared to, say, Vampire Survivors itself. And, so, when you do complete a run, there’s still plenty of room for both your build to develop and the density to ramp up for a while, and you get the choice to either cap off the run or continue on until you’re finally destroyed, earning more data disks and running up your score, and it’s fun to do a little victory run if you’re enjoying a loadout.
You have a good bit more flexibility in how you start a run in the sequel too. There are 18 unlockable pilots with a different weapon as their starter, and each also has a variant who unlocks with them that uses the same weapon but has a different innate skill. There are six different ships, with special abilities, move speeds, and hit box size. And you can equip six augments out of a pool that unlock as you accomplish various challenges while playing. Finally, you can layer on difficulty options, disable helpful mechanics, and ramp up the challenge with negative anomalies, boosting your score multiplier the more toggles you have enabled. There are positive anomalies that make things easier but using those disables unlocks and achievements.
Unfortunately, the focus of most of those nice new features is the Survivors-like part of the game’s lineage, and its qualities as a shmup are less polished. There are a lot of little problems and subjective flaws but the overarching criticism I have is that it just doesn’t have enough impact. The graphics are fine in isolation but Survivors-like density scaling means the screen gets too busy and enemies, shots, and effects are too broadly colorful to make it easy to visually parse what’s happening in any given frame. There’s not much punch to either enemies getting destroyed or you taking hits, and those effects get so lost in the chaos that I rarely even noticed that I’d taken damage until I’d finish a stage and glanced at my health bar. Gunlocked 2 adds a focus mode for tighter dodging and a recharging temporary invulnerability but even in boss battles [aside from one forced use of the invul] I found myself rarely bothering and just moving to a different spot entirely.
And even the roguelite structure itself isn’t all that well-developed, frankly, despite it being the focus. There’s a much wider variety in passive upgrades to equip and stack on level-up, and a lot of them are just too over-engineered and unsatisfying. A lot of them are bizarrely conditional, or essentially extra attacks that proc occasionally, and while the idea is that you’re setting up a build that has a cascade or cycle of effect triggers, in practice each individual component is rarely noticeable when you pick it up. You can even end up being offered and picking options that you literally do not have any way to trigger with your current weapons, and the visual language of the icons makes it tough to parse your level-up screen quickly.
The main way the game attempts to address this is by giving you a LOT of options at level-up, and that just makes things worse. I’ve never liked the way this genre interrupts you so frequently to pick from three cards, but three cards is actually a lot better than, like, seven, and four of the seven make me solve a goddamn word problem to understand what they do. All of this culminates in the biggest disappointment I have with Gunlocked, the original and now the sequel, which is just how hard it is to evolve the weapons.
For one thing, the game has a hint system for Symbionics on the main menu, but it’s not available when you need it, i.e. in the level up screen. Some of the combinations of passives you need are obscure or counter-intuitive, most of them require you to have multiple copies of one or more of the required passives, some require rare passives that might not ever show up in a run period. And it’s not a simple matter of having the right weapon and the right passives either – you have to then wait until all your weapon slots are full, then level up enough until you hit the point where you WOULD be picking another weapon, but now you are instead prompted to choose an existing weapon to modify. Now, you need to intuit which of your weapons, if any, have met the conditions for their Symbionic upgrade, because every weapon ALSO has three kind of middling side-grades to choose from, and the menu does not clue you in if you’ve also earned the more broadly useful Symbionic option yet.
I wound up stumbling into NO Symbionics from just playing around, and I suspect it’d be a brutal slog to learn them on your own, as you’re only given one chance per-run to even perform the check. So, once again, like all these games, you’re really just supposed to look them up, make a little note of which ones you want to try to make this round, and then reroll until you get given the right choices. Except you also have to do that in a strict time, or rather level, limit. And then the evolved weapons aren’t really appreciably more impressive anyway. You ought to at least be able to see hints once you’ve unlocked them once already.
And, just like with the first Gunlocked, once you’ve unlocked all the pilots and augments, or more to the point, unlocked the ones you want to use, there’s not actually any endgame goal or progress to pursue. You just slowly accrue more ways to play the same basic game, fight the same couple bosses, over and over until you find something better to do with your time. In a sense, that’s true of all these kinds of games, but there’s usually at least some attempt to provide the illusion of progress – new areas, reskinned enemies, some form of meta progression to gradually ease the difficulty of later content. Everything in Gunlocked kind of blurs together, every run visually devolving into the same chaotic mess.
Gunlocked 2 is fine, for a while, but it probably won’t totally hold your attention for very long. It requires too much focus to be a good podcast game, it doesn’t reward your focus enough to be terribly engaging, its a bit lacking in punch and quality of life for how long it spent in Early Access, and it’s bloated without feeling meaningfully distinct. I think the biggest mark against it, frankly, is its price. I gave the original Gunlocked a pass when I played it because, while it had many of the same problems and failings, it was only a couple bucks and I felt like I’d enjoyed enough of the few hours I played it to give it a soft recommendation. The sequel costs more than twice as much, and while it might technically have more than twice the content, or have taken twice the effort to make, I don’t think it’s really twice as fun.
Gunlocked 2 can be purchased on Steam.