Gunpoint is a short game. Just under 3 hours. I could have played it while watching Return of the King, and still have 20 minutes left before the credits. On the other hand, each hobbit foot probably took 9 people to make, and that’s the number of bodies left in my wake by the time the game ended. James Bond has a license to kill, but I don’t.
It may just be that I don’t make a very good noir PI. As I made my way through Gunpoints levels, I found myself wondering what the game would look like if someone else was playing. Would they elegantly rewire switches? Carefully trick guards into opening doors for them? Swiftly and effectively smash down windows, and call elevators?
Or perhaps they’d still just play like me: a crab in a trench coat. Scuttling about and turning off the lights, and almost brute forcing their way through the level.
While Gunpoint is ostensibly a sort of stealth platformer, the Crosswire device is its standout mechanic.
You can make the lights turn off when a guard pulls the trigger on their gun, or call the elevator with a motion detector. Or you can just make the security camera open the door for you instead of setting off the alarms.
However, levels only start with the ability to rewire objects on the red frequency. For any other color/shape of wire, you need to get to and attach a hacking device to a breaker. In later levels, reaching this is a large portion of the puzzle.
It’s also a good place to talk about the flaws of Gunpoint. None of these are big, but they all feel like things that would have gotten some more consideration if the game released today.
For the Crosswire, the flaw is that two of the primary colors are red and green, which feel like it would be quite easy to screw up if you were color blind. And while symbology for what can be linked together, the symbols only appear when an object is moused over.
The narrative and the mechanics are often in conflict. The biggest example would be how much fun it is to jump on guards and beat them up. There’s a fun audio cue, a button prompt, and then at the end of the game, I get told how many people I killed and injured.
It just feels bad.
None of these are dealbreakers. Just small annoyances. And perhaps Gunpoint would have overstayed it’s welcome if it had been longer. Still, I do wish there was a bit more too it.
Another Night In A City That Goes To Bed On Time
Gunpoint is fine. Eleven years ago it was probably an incredible indie experience, but these days, the bar is higher, and frankly, in that time Tom Francis has made better games like Tactical Breach Wizards. It’s not my worst use of $10 this year, but it’s not my best either.
As a final brief note, I want to mention something. Once you beat the final level of Gunpoint, you get the door-kickers. These are a pair of boots that allow you to just run full tilt and kick down doors. They are incredibly fun, completely break level structure, and I really have to wonder why it wasn’t possible to give them to me before I beat the game.
Like, yeah, they’re busted, but it would have been such a great finale.