Gunnheim

I want to root for Gunnheim. The premise alone has an infectious energy to it: gun-toting Viking warriors fighting through hordes of Norse hellspawn across four distinct worlds, all rendered in a clean low-poly style that runs smoothly on basically any machine. SIEIDI Ltd clearly had a specific feeling in mind, and in flashes, you catch it. The shooting has heft. Weapon pickups like railguns, uzis, miniguns, and bazookas feel genuinely satisfying when they land in your hands, and each area boss demands real pattern recognition rather than mindless spray-and-pray. The metal-tinged soundtrack keeps the adrenaline moving, even if it loops a little too eagerly after the first hour. The cracks appear the moment you sit down alone. Gunnheim was designed around the couch co-op fantasy, and the solo experience makes that uncomfortably obvious. Enemies pile in fast and with little warning, weapon drops from chests and fallen enemies are frustratingly rare, and the default firearm will carry you only so far before the numbers stop making sense. There are no selectable difficulty levels to soften the curve, and the gap between having a good weapon pickup and being stuck with your starter gun is wide enough to flip a run from fun to tedious in seconds. The invisibility of the levelling system compounds this: the game tracks some kind of progression between stages, but it never tells you what it actually changes, which makes the whole system feel decorative. Online co-op adds warmth but brings its own friction. Connecting with friends requires either port forwarding or a bit of network know-how, and control remapping is absent, which creates headaches for non-QWERTY players. With a full group of two to four, though, the game genuinely shifts gears. The chaos becomes shared, the weapon scarcity turns into loot competition, and moments like rocket launcher recoil launching a friend off a ledge into an abyss turn into the kind of accidental comedy that makes a two-hour session memorable. Local split-screen and cross-platform multiplayer support are real strengths here, especially for a game this age. Remote Play Together also makes it workable even if your friends are across town. The structural thinness is real and worth naming plainly. Four worlds with six or seven levels each, a final boss in Odin, and a hardcore mode gating two of the four playable characters until after a full clear: that is the entire content offering. A focused solo run can end in roughly two to three hours. The level environments do carry their own visual identity and shift between worlds, but the design rarely surprises. Destructible cover is a nice tactile touch. Enemy variety spans jotuns, dwarves, and various hellspawn, and the area bosses genuinely impressed some players with their multi-phase patterns. But between the bosses, repetition sets in, and the short runtime means Gunnheim does not have the depth to mask it the way longer games can. This is a game that knows exactly one thing it wants to be and almost gets there. If you have two or three friends, controllers, and appetite for a single sweaty session of Norse mayhem, there is a real moment of fun buried in here. Approach it as a weekend night throwaway co-op game and it can deliver. Approach it as a solo twin-stick shooter with replay value, and the roughly 40 percent positive Steam reception starts making a lot of sense.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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