GunSpectre Reviews

GunSpectre is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Now there's a lot of problems with this "game" which I'm about to get into, to explain why you shouldn't bother buying this, but first I just think it's remarkable that Clickteam themselves had the audacity to put their name on one of their garbage products... see, Clickteam have, perhaps indirectly or unintentionally, contributed to a great deal of harm to the gaming industry, and not just because their point and click game construction kit, Clickteam Fusion, is really, really bad, almost as bad as RPG Maker. No, the reason they cause harm is because Clickteam Fusion is one of the primary tools used by Russian asset flip scammers with fake games and fake reviews to pollute the Steam store, scamming gamers and giving indie devs a bad name. Now, I know, McDonalds aren't responsible for making people fat, but they sure facilitate it, and the same is true for Clickteam. I love gaming and I'm an avid supporter of the industry (despite there being so many poor quality games out there). So I think gamers should be aware of products like this and the nature of the developers behind them. And with that backdrop, we can perhaps understand more closely why this mobile app, GunSpectre, has come from a bad place and is most certainly a bad game you should not buy. Here's some other reasons (although I think the fact this is a mobile app really should be enough)! From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this mobile app. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. Some of the defects in the mobile app can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? GunSpectre is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the mobile app, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Very disappointing. I have never seen a game that hates the player for exploring its world so much. It has a large sprawling map to explore, which might sound cool to some, but there isn't really anything interesting to find. Almost every time you run into a dead-end (and there are many) it locks you into a fight with one of the few "miniboss" enemies that you have seen a hundred times before, which are simple enough to be boring, but have enough health to sometimes still hit you. And do you know what you get for killing it? Exactly, nothing! It would be so easy to just make them drop one of the pickups/powerups in the game, as a treat, but nope. Whenever you enter a room and it's a dead end and you hear the doors lock, the game is just like: "fuck you for guessing wrong which path was the correct one, I'll just punish you with a fight and waste your time for a bit now". Sometimes you'll find a room with crates in a dead end, but those crates still have the same low drop chance as any regular crate or enemy, and sometimes you can find a room with six crates and still come out empty handed. It boggles my mind. One quickly realizes that fighting regular enemies is a waste of time too, unless they block your path, so most rooms might as well be empty because you'll just run through them. When there are multiple enemies they are always of the same type, the game never even tries to mix things up by god forbid having me fight a shield guy and a dash guy at once. Nope, you either fight two dash guys or two shield guys, else you'd start having fun, those are the rules, sorry. There are a few bossfights but some of those have a bunch of non-telegraphed attacks you just gotta learn the timing for after a few deaths. Oh and if you die at the boss you gotta walk through the whole dungeon again. Like there is a solid 10 minute game hidden in those 2 hour slog, so if you see the trailer and think to yourself, yes I wanna do exactly that without any variation for the next two hours, then this might be for you.

~ GUNSPECTRE ~ > Charming GBC-like pixel art > Straight-forward controls > Easy to get the hang of > Decent variety of enemies > Really fun boss fights > Not too easy, not too difficult > Strong "Link's Awakening" influence Not a lot to complain about here. Only 1 bug encountered, where an enemy flew off the edge of the screen. Gave off strong Zelda vibes, except not as cryptic... and it's a twin-stick shooter. It's short (completed with an *in-game time of 3 hours), but sweet! ★★★★☆