Guntastic

My honest reaction after the first session: this thing is tighter than it has any right to be for a two-person studio. Guntastic runs one-shot-one-kill rounds capped at 25 seconds, and when the timer hits zero, anybody still breathing gets force-eliminated. No camping, no slow burns, no turtling in a corner. Every round is a hard reset. The scoring is straightforward - reach 10 kills first, and killing yourself docks a point so you actually have to think before you spray. That single scoring rule adds more competitive pressure than it looks like on paper. The weapon pool is the real reason to stick around past the first few minutes. Rocket launchers and shotguns are in there alongside driller-heads that punch through walls, walking bomb units that scurry toward the nearest target, and energy guns with their own projectile behavior. Power-ups layer on top mid-round: invisibility, shields, assorted chaos. The whole thing runs on three buttons, which sounds patronizing until the ludicrous-difficulty AI starts reading your inputs like it went to film school on your playstyle. The skill ceiling exists, it's just accessed through positioning and weapon timing rather than movement tech. If you came here hoping for wall-jump cancels and strafe micro-adjustments, look elsewhere. The arenas are hand-crafted and each one runs a dynamic trap element. The High Voltage level teleports both players and their projectiles across the map, which creates genuinely funny cross-map kills. A medieval castle map runs two simultaneous traps. The sewer and Egyptian temple levels are fine but the map variety overall is slim. Reviewers across the board flagged this as the main structural weakness, and they are right: you see the full content offering inside one sitting. It draws obvious comparisons to Duck Game and TowerFall, which both carried more raw content and more physics-driven unpredictability. Guntastic's core is polished but shallow by comparison. Here is the part I have to be straight with you about. The online player base is thin to the point of near-nonexistent for public matchmaking. Multiple reviewers at launch reported being unable to find a single public opponent. The developers acknowledged this openly and added AI bots at four difficulty settings to compensate. Private matches work fine, so if you bring your own lobby, none of this matters. But if you are buying this to grind public queue matches solo, the servers are not going to cooperate. This is a couch game first, a private-lobby online game second, and a public-matchmaking game basically not at all. The AI bots are genuinely competitive at higher settings and serve as a reasonable fallback, but that is a ceiling, not a floor. For the right situation, which is four people in the same room with controllers and something to prove, this works extremely well. The rounds are so short that nobody ever feels too far behind, the weapon drops keep things chaotic, and the brutal scoring keeps it honest. Outside of that specific context, the thin content and dead public servers are real problems that no amount of tight core design can fully paper over.

Fred · Scout Team

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