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Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite first-person shooter that's entirely focused on loot. In each run, you are constantly finding various weapons, ability upgrades, and passive modifiers in an effort to mold yourself into the perfect soldier to battle against waves of increasingly complicated and powerful waves of enemies. The experience at times can feel like a slow burn, but Gunfire Reborn is quite possibly the best way to do some cooperative shooting on mobile.

Furry FPS

There is very little setup to Gunfire Reborn. You play as one of a handful of gun-toting anthropomorphic animals who are tasked with blasting their way through dungeons and slaying bosses. There's no real story that unfolds along the way, unless you count the evolution of the loadout and abilities you equip to your character.

As you load directly into new biomes to fight the next sets of tough enemies, you need to keep your weapons and abilities up to snuff. Enemies may drop random weapons with procedurally generated modifiers like “50% chance to spawn a ball of lightning” or “reloads 75% faster off an empty clip” and certain levels have chests, hidden stages, or predictable checkpoint spots where you can pick up passive talents and spend coins you've been collecting to upgrade your existing gear, heal up, etc.

Multiplayer mayhem

As a shooter, Gunfire Reborn isn't particularly complicated. There's some basic traversal options and a few guns with unique firing mechanics, but most of the game is reliant on your ability to circle strafe or use environmental cover effectively while being smart about how to tune your character with the random upgrades you find along the way. Between runs you also get the ability to spend a special currency on unlocking and upgrading abilities that provide permanent power boosts to help you get further along each time you start a new game.

The run, gun, die, repeat loop of Gunfire Reborn is nothing new, but it helps that its guns and abilities intertwine with an elemental system that adds a lot of variability to how you build your characters on each run. Also, perhaps the biggest plus side of the game is its ability for up to four players to team up on runs, which makes for a more chaotic experience that feels less like you're stuck on an endless upgrade treadmill… at least by yourself.

Longtime looter

There are definitely unique aspects to how Gunfire Reborn's abilities work, but if I had to lay a complaint about the game it's that so many of them are passive or simply reliant on procedural generation to the point that none of them really work to make the game feel unique to control. The voxel-like in-game graphics also don't help the game look unique, as they somewhat deaden a lot of the inspired character and art direction present here.

On a final note, it's worth noting that Gunfire Reborn may feel best with other players, but run lengths can go on for over an hour which might be hard to manage playing on a mobile device. If you're playing single player this is way less of an issue, especially since Gunfire Reborn has a good checkpointing system, but playing solo can also definitely makes the game feel a lot less lively.

The bottom line

The best times I've had with Gunfire Reborn were when I set aside the time to matchmake with other players and play an extended session. I'd even go as far to say it's now my go-to cooperative game. The game is still enjoyable as-is playing solo, but the long upgrade treadmill and somewhat generic look and feel can make the single player experience feel a bit dull by comparison.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/gunfire-reborn-review/

Wales Interactive have firmly established themselves as some of the most prolific FMV developers out there, putting out three titles on the App Store last year and already ushering in an absurd virtual party-turned-murder-investigation with Who Muted Uncle Marcus? in early 2022. This game puts you in the shoes of Abby as she grills her eccentric relatives after a family meeting where a deadly plot unfolded. Despite a concept that should set the stage for a fun locked-door mystery, Who Muted Uncle Marcus? feels forced and arbitrary at almost every turn.

Family farce

Who Muted Uncle Marcus? is a game that takes place over a virtual meeting in celebration of Abby's mother's birthday. The game quickly establishes that this kind of call is a family tradition and that it is also conducted in the format of a quiz game, with each family member taking turns to host a round of questions while the others compete for points.

As Abby prepares for this call, she gets another from the black sheep of the family: Uncle Marcus. Marcus calls to tell Abby that he has been poisoned and that the culprit has to be someone in the family. This sets you off on an adventure where you not only try to navigate the quiz game and Abby's family drama, but also try to identify the killer and discover how to prevent Marcus from dying.

Quiz or question?

Like most conventional FMV games, Who Muted Uncle Marcus? presents you, the player, with video clips of all of this action playing out with real-life actors. The action only somewhat pauses (or actually pauses if you use the “Streamer Mode” game option) when you–as Abby–can make a choice about how to proceed forward. For the vast majority of this game, your choices revolve around who you want Abby to pair up for certain quiz rounds with and whether or not you want to try and play the family quiz or shift the conversation toward gathering information about the family meeting that led to Marcus's poisoning.

By the end of the game, you get the chance to accuse certain family members of doing the foul deed, provided you've gathered enough evidence to make a case against them. Then you are treated to one of the game's many endings before being invited to play the game again to try gathering new evidence to unlock other endings.

Abitrary arbitration

Right from the outset of Who Muted Uncle Marcus?, it feels like the creators are not confident in their setup. The script has Uncle Marcus comment on the weird rules of the quiz game (which are clearly the way they are so that you can rotate between people to talk to), and the choices in the game don't align with any particular logic to allow you to actually play detective like you might expect. As a result, the whole thing feels like an arduous and random choose-your-own adventure as opposed to an adventure that asks you to investigate or clue-in on certain aspects of character behavior.

After my second playthrough of the game, I realized that I didn't really care at that point who tried to kill Uncle Marcus. The process of revisiting conversations to unlock new evidence from Abby's cartoonishly horrible family would have been a big ask even if there was a logic to intuit about how to get each character to spill the beans. Instead, some unlocks come by purposely getting certain quiz answers incorrect or not even trying to ask about the family meeting at all. There are also some logic holes I discovered where certain clips talk about information that you may not have actually discovered yet. This all gets exacerbated by the frustrating way in which a clip-skipping system works on repeat playthroughs (which only allows you to pass by certain sections of the game in a blink but makes you watch other segments in their entirety for reasons that don't make a ton of sense).

The bottom line

The concept for Who Muted Uncle Marcus? is fun and full of intrigue, but all that feels squandered when you don't actually feel like you're in control of any investigating. It feels more like a toy you are supposed to poke and prod at until you eventually find out what happens, though it's easy to lose interest in doing that considering the characters and game features you have to deal with to do that.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/who-muted-uncle-marcus-review/