Greedy Guns Preview - Might Be Greedy But I Want More!

Greedy Guns is a twin stick shooter with Metroidvania elements developed by Tio Atum, a team of three developers from Portugal, Greedy Guns is their first adventure into the world of PC gaming after releasing a mobile game, Super Bit Dash, for iOS and Android back in 2014. Greedy Guns has just shown up on Kickstarter after being Greenlit and has an estimated December 2016 release date for PC, Linux, and Mac.

You get to play as Bob or Kate, two mercenaries working for Holocorp. You've been sent to an alien world as a preemptive measure to fight rare aliens for their DNA and recover strange artifacts. Traversing through this world you will encounter a variety of platforms, puzzles, and enemies of all different sizes. When faced with danger, Bob and Kate are also able to use money recovered from killing enemies along the way to purchase new weapons. These weapons are a mix of real world weaponry, science fiction, and some references to other games such as the Contra Gun.

Whether you play using keyboard and mouse or a controller, the movement of the characters is extremely tight, which is needed when facing the almost bullet hell bosses of the game. The only complaint that can be found about the controls is that there is no way to remap them. Movement, like dodging and jumping, is mapped to a face button instead of a shoulder button requiring you to stop shooting earlier to avoid attacks successfully. On the upside though the controls being so tight means that if you do get caught up in the midst of enemies and bullets and end up taking damage, then you have no one to blame but yourself. 

During the demo you only get access to five of the weapons that will be in the full game, they are unlocked by purchasing them from vendors. All the starting weapons are relatively cheap, and you will already accumulate enough money by the time you reached the first vendor to buy them all in the demo. The weapons that are available to you in the demo are a Pistol, Rapid Fire, Grenade Launcher, Laser Gun, and Contra Gun. Of these the main one that you want to watch out for is the Grenade Launcher, you'll faster kill yourself than any aliens, but when you learn to use it it's invaluable. With the rate that you gain money it will be interesting to see how expensive the end game weapons become, especially when there is no money penalty on death. One of the best aspects of the weapons is that each is useful for a different type of encounter, getting stuck at a boss for a while might just mean you have to swap your loadout and try again with a different strategy. At any time, you can only have two weapons on you so be sure to pick wisely as you continue on your journey. 

Being a Metroidvania style game you will also have to do some backtracking once you can get through new areas with unlocked weapons and abilities. Being a linear demo there wasn't too much of this though, but there were a variety of teases showing metal walls and giant crystals, that I'm assuming require a lot more firepower to destroy later on.

The art style used in Greedy Guns keeps a bright comical feel to it. An aesthetic like this is perfect here because it allows any weird creature or landscape to be added without anything looking too out of place. This kind of art style is very reminiscent of classic flash games that you might see on Newgrounds or Miniclip, which makes sense as the developers used to work at Miniclip. Don't let this comfortable art style trick you though. Even in this short demo, some parts stumped me for a while.

The game uses chiptune music and sound effects to pull together a retro aesthetic for the background audio. The upbeat tone does a great job to reinforce the sense of adventure in the game. Gun sounds are all clear and match the weapon being fired, and you can tell not only the difference between the Laser Gun and the Contra Gun but also the difference between your Pistol and Rapid Fire. Each of the enemies that you face also sounds just as squishy as you would hope they would as you attempt to put as many bullets in them as possible.

Greedy Guns also has a multiplayer mode that is drop-in and available as soon as you start the game. Player 2 will get to play as the mercenary that Player 1 didn't pick. Unlike a lot of games Player 2 isn't some second fiddle, getting to have all the same weapons and share in the glory it makes Greedy Guns a great game to play with a friend. There doesn't seem to be any enemy scaling with the multiple players though so expect the experience to be a bit easier.

Greedy Guns is a fun title to play if you want to give yourself a bit of a Metroidvania challenge, with great controls and an option for local co-op it's a great game to share with a friend too. If the full release manages to continue to look and feel of the demo, then this might be a game that fans of the genre would want to pick up.

If you want to play the demo for yourself, then you can go to their itch.io page and download it for PC, Mac, or Linux.

The Greedy Guns demo was previewed on PC via Steam with a code provided by the developers.