Guns, Gore & Cannoli

I came to Guns, Gore & Cannoli expecting a throwaway indie novelty and walked away with genuine respect for what Rogueside pulled off. This is a side-scrolling run-and-gun in the Metal Slug mold, set in Prohibition-era Thugtown where mob enforcer Vinnie Cannoli is knee-deep in zombies, rival gangsters, and soldiers before the first level is even done. It wears its arcade DNA loud and proud, and for the most part that DNA is clean. The shooting itself is satisfying in the way that matters: clear feedback, readable enemy tells, and a weapon swap loop that keeps you honest. You carry a pistol with unlimited ammo as your safety net, but the real toolkit runs through a tommy gun, shotgun, flamethrower, and a lightning-style electrical weapon that fries groups nicely. Reloads are deliberate and slow enough that you actually feel the pressure of mid-horde clip management - a small but real mechanical tension that prevents the whole thing from going fully brain-dead. Kicking enemies back when they crowd you is a satisfying gap-closer, and the grenade toss adds just enough throwable chaos to stop fights from feeling completely flat. The game shoots horizontally only - no aiming up or down - which keeps the feel close to classic arcade, though it does limit how much tactical depth combat can develop over the course of 12 levels. The repetition complaint is legitimate. Later levels throw faster, more aggressive enemy mixes at you - shielded mobsters, military units with firearms, giant rats in the sewers - but the fundamental rhythm of walk right, shoot, reload, repeat never really evolves. Solo players will notice this fatigue around the halfway point. The local co-op for up to four players changes the calculation significantly: shared health, shared ammo pickups, and scaled enemy counts give the sessions a different kind of chaos that papers over the saminess. The versus deathmatch mode is there too, with its own small maps and customisable kill limits, though it reads more like a bonus than a real competitive mode. Worth noting: co-op here is strictly local. If your crew is remote, you are out of luck with this entry. Two sticking points beyond the repetition. First, the platforming segments introduced in the back half of the campaign feel mismatched with the jump physics, which are floaty in ways the game never really accounts for in its level design. Second, there is a sewer level. The sewer level is as bad as every piece of coverage you will find about it suggests. Boss fights at chapter ends do at least provide clear difficulty spikes and a reason to pick your weapon rotation carefully going in. The hand-drawn art is the other unambiguous win here. Every street, rooftop, and speakeasy in Thugtown has visible craft behind it. The period-appropriate jazz and big-band soundtrack actually fits rather than feeling like asset-store filler, and the voice acting - overblown Italian-American mobster drawl - plays the comedy straight enough to land. Running time sits somewhere between three and five hours depending on difficulty and how badly the sewer level breaks your spirit. Multiple difficulty settings give completionists a reason to revisit, and the PVP deathmatch adds a little more couch time for groups who want it after credits roll. For shooter fans specifically: there is no netcode to stress about because there is no online play. Controller polling rate and monitor refresh rate are non-factors here. This is a gamepad-on-the-couch experience, and judged on those terms it delivers a tight, honest arcade loop with a couple of rough edges and a runtime that respects your evening.

Fred · Scout Team

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