If we could choose any developer to live in our hair, it'd be Twisted Pixel. Their games are inflated to bursting point with personality. Any opportunity for a song or a joke is seized, and every chance to slip their own faces into the game is grabbed. Everything they do carries the heavy stink of people who love their job and like each other. It could be a lie, but if it is, we don't want to know.
It's the same with The Gunstringer. The game opens with a movie of the team running around backstage, trying to get The Gunstringer show ready. There's an audience of real people in the background of the cartoon stage. There's a Bastion-esque narrator, who comments on your performance while the audience boo and cheer. And there's you, the puppeteer of the latest game that's trying to do something new with Kinect.
The two simple motions work together brilliantly, standing or sat down. The puppet strings mean it instantly makes sense. And when the action gets intense, you'll only occasionally feel limited by the imprecision of these large gestures.
Other controls mix it up - at times, you'll use both hands to fire, taking out two streams of enemies at once. At other times, you'll use your left hand to drag the hero in and out of cover. These are all clever and immediately comfortable - but there are times when it doesn't work so well. The times when you're restricted to just jumping are needlessly simple, and the fist-fights could have been a little less brain-dead than right-left-right-left-win. At these times, it's down to the game's raw charm to force you to forgive it. It pulls it off.
There's a worry that The Gunstringer's natural home is in the arcade, with Twisted Pixel's other titles. It's a short game, that's slightly prone to repetition, so £30 might be a big ask for a slim offering. Between them Twisted Pixel and Microsoft have made up the difference. It comes with Fruit Ninja - a great tech demo that only really makes sense as part of a bundle. And there's an outstanding 2Gb lump of free Day 1 DLC. It's different again to the game - it's a gobsmacking interactive movie with acting that'd make Hollyoaks look like a stage production.
On its own, The Gunstringer might have been tough to recommend. As part of this bundle, it's a unique, funny, flawed and downright loveable Kinect experience. Buy it before your soul turns sour.
7 comments so far...
Waffles2541 on 16 Sep '11 said:
Twisted Pixel makes some of my most favorite games. Same i don't have a kinect because this would probably be added to the list.
VizualDemon on 16 Sep '11 said:
I played the demo and erm........it was ok......but it was a bit like getting a free season ticket to watch a Premier League Club and then realising it was Spurs......
pauloselhombre on 17 Sep '11 said:
After the panning you gave Rise of Nightmares, this gets an 8? I really want to know what you guys have been smoking over the last week or so.
Windowlicker79 on 17 Sep '11 said:
Why is it so unbelievable that one game is considerably better than another?
Rise Of Nightmares is blighted with broken controls and poor presentation, whereas Gunstringer makes much better use of Kinect and is generally a much more appealing game.
It seems like you didn't actually read the Rise Of Nightmares review.
golliwoza on 17 Sep '11 said:
Apparently on the dashboard of the game marketplace this got a 9 out of 10 instead of an 8 from OXM.
I love twisted pixels games and I have really enjoyed them, I hope to pick this up when I finally get kinect at a good price.
Vegetunks9000 on 18 Sep '11 said:
man forgot about this. Was all hyped up about Powerup Heroes, and this went under my radar. Sounds awesome. May be one of my October purchases.
pauloselhombre on 20 Sep '11 said:
Nonsense. I read the Rise of Nightmares review from start to finish and found it to be the exact opposite of my personal experience. As with every other reviewer complaining about the controls, they clearly don't have their Kinect set up very well. That's the only explanation that makes sense without getting into the realm of personal assumptions (such as that maybe a lot of games reviewers lack physical coordination? Probably not true, so the only real explanation is the setup thing).Rise of Nightmares works just fine. Played it, completed it, loved it. Yeah, there was the occasional control hiccup, but for me that occurred about 3 times in the entire game and took about a second to fix. The Gunstringer on the other hand certainly doesn't 'make better use of Kinect'. Another on rails shooter with painfully obvious lag? Oh please, what a joke. As for the presentation of Rise of Nightmares, that's utterly irrelevant. Sure, the visuals didn't exactly push the console, but they were perfectly functional and did what they needed to.
As someone who has played both games, Rise of Nightmares has more glaring flaws, but in my opinion is a much better game by virtue of the fact that The Gunstringer is a tired, repetitive example of style over substance. The artistic concept behind it is great, but the game it's tacked onto is utterly lacking in ambition. It's a dull game done well rather than Rise of Nightmares' 'good game that could've been done better'.