Gunbrella

My first hour with Gunbrella was mostly spent fighting the controls rather than the goons shooting at me. The umbrella is your gun, your parachute, your dash and your shield, and it all hangs off a small handful of inputs, so early fights become a mess of half-commands where you meant to pop the canopy and block a shot but instead flung yourself sideways into a pit. It does not help that plenty of enemies like to plink away from just past the edge of the screen while you are still learning which button does what. My advice is to push through it. A couple of hours in, once the dash-boost has turned into reflex and you have more than one type of shell loaded, the thing stops feeling like two gadgets duct-taped together and starts feeling like a single verb. Underneath the gimmick this is a compact 2D side-scroller with a nasty little revenge story attached. You play a woodsman whose wife is murdered, and the trail drags you out of the trees and into a soot-stained industrial world of company towns, rail lines, cultists and people who are all pretty sure their own atrocity is the reasonable one. Areas are connected by train rather than one seamless map, and each stop mixes combat corridors with a hub full of NPCs handing out small jobs and shopkeepers selling ammo and upgrades. Dialogue occasionally lets you pick a side, though the choices are lighter than the framing suggests. Doinksoft, the studio behind Gato Roboto, clearly cares more about atmosphere than systems depth, and the pixel art carries a lot of that weight: the animation on the brolly opening mid-air is worth the ticket on its own. What genuinely works is movement. Firing downward to hover, cracking the canopy open to eat an incoming shot, then dashing along a vent or a rail to cross a room is the loop the whole game is built around, and when a fight gives you vertical space it sings. Alternate shell types are the other good idea here. Swapping between something wide and close-range, something explosive and something that punches through armour changes how you approach a room more than the modest upgrade shop implies, and the game is smart enough to throw enemy layouts at you that reward the swap. The runtime is short by design, roughly a weekend, and I would call that a feature. It says its piece and gets out. Where it disappoints is in how little the combat grows. The core encounter is a handful of gunmen and a couple of chargers in a flat-ish room, repeated with new sprites, and by the back half you are solving those rooms on autopilot. Enemy variety thins out exactly when the story is getting bleaker and more interesting, which is a strange mismatch of pacing. Bosses are the high point mechanically but there are not many of them. The side quests are mostly fetch work dressed up in good writing, and the story itself sprints through ideas about extraction, faith and grief that deserved another few hours of room to breathe. There are also moments where damage feels cheap rather than earned, usually the offscreen shooter problem again, and the checkpointing can make a bad screen transition sting more than it should. So who is this for. If you want a tightly paced action platformer with one excellent central mechanic, strong art direction and a story with actual teeth, you will get a lot out of it and probably finish it in two sittings. If you are here for a deep combat system with build variety and a long tail, this will feel undercooked around the fourth hour. I land closer to the first camp. It does one thing exceptionally well, it knows it, and it does not overstay. Just do not judge it on the opening hour, because that hour is the worst version of the game.

Alex · Scout Team

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