Gal*Gun 2 is a rail shooter where you play as the protagonist, a high school student. A package appears out of nowhere that contains a gun and a VR headset. Naturally, he puts on the headset and suddenly an angle, Risu, appears. She tells you that she has been assigned to you as your demon hunting partner. With only 19 days to go, you must meet the quote of demons hunted before the deadline. You’re armed with the pheromone blaster to shoot the girls who have been possessed by demons. It’s not a great story by any means, but it is an excuse for the crazy premise.
And the premise is where it is at. It’s so ridiculous that it crosses the line from being offensive to being too exaggerated to take seriously. The game is in first person, and you move the reticule to shoot the large numbers of female students who are rushing towards you. You can aim at three places for each student: their head, body or legs. One of them will be their weak point, which is an instant kill, otherwise they’ll have to get hit a few times before they are down. The explanation here is that they get euphoria from your shots…
Every so often, students exude a purple aura and are attached by chibi versions of the demons. You’ll need to shoot the demons off before you can easily take down the student. The demons can then be shot or sucked into your weapon. Sucking them up gives you higher points at the end of the level. The other thing is that you cannot freely move about. You’re stuck in that spot until all the girls are shot down, then you move onto the next area. Sometimes the game gives you a choice in which direction you’d want to go but it rarely gives you anything meaningfully different. The game is a bit restrictive in this way.
The thing that strikes you at first is the graphics. They are… not great. They feel like low resolution models that are blown up and while it may be okay for the smaller screens of handhelds (the previous game was on the Vita, and this game is also available on the Switch), it does not look good on your TV. It feels really budget. The gameplay doesn’t fully make up for it either as the shooting is only serviceable at best. Your shots lack heft and impact. The shooting doesn’t feel good as a result and all too often, you’re not sure whether your shots hit properly or not. The whole game feels clunky this way, like it was built for consoles a few generations ago.
The game has three types of levels. The first one is the one that is also the most fun. It’s the mode that you’d expect, which is that you are supposed to shoot everything that moves. The second mode still has you shooting everything but with the added annoyance of staying in one spot (instead of moving through the level) and protecting a character from being hurt. The third and last is the least fun, as this one has you moving around the level to find a number of items. These items are hidden in the environment, and it is down to luck to find everything within the time limit, not helped that their placements are random each time.
Having gameplay that relies on chance is never fun, but the game does it a number of times, leading to some slight frustrations. The game itself isn’t hard, but when you fail the level due to chance, it is not fun. Boss battles can sometimes rely on luck in finding when and where they appear, and when the shooting is this clunky, it’s not a great experience. This means that boss battles can drag out for longer than required as you need to wait through yet another cycle before you can progress.
There are six endings which mostly depend on the romance path that you pick. There’s your angle partner, Risu, your neighbor that lives next door, Chisu, and your childhood friend, Nanako. The bulk of the game remains the same, so it is even more egregious when the game only features one save slot. It wants to force you to replay the whole game multiple times to get all the endings, rather than just allowing you to save at strategic places and reload. While you can still do that, it requires a bit more effort as you need to close the game down and then backup your saved data to either the cloud or to a USB.
If you die in a level, you don’t have to restart the whole thing. There are frequent checkpoints which helps make this an even easier game than it already is. Despite being forced to replay the story multiple times, it’s made slightly better, depending on how you see it, by the short length. There are only a handful of story missions, which you can finish in around 1.5 hours, a bit faster when you skip the cutscenes. If you know what you are doing and the requirements for the endings, then it is quite simple to breeze through, it’s just a tad repetitive. The game has a bunch of side missions but they’re basically the same things, reusing the same environments, so there isn’t much replay value in this game.
If you’ve played Double Peace, then a lot of the environments will feel familiar. The developers have reused a lot of the layouts, which is quite disappointing. This feels like a reskin rather than a proper sequel. There are a few fan service dedicated features, such as the doki doki mode where you keep shooting a particular girl until they go into ecstasy. You can pose pretty much all the character models in the game. You can even use the demon sweeper gun to suck up their clothes during gameplay.
Overall, Gal*Gun 2 has one objective, and it provides all that. It’s a fan service game with a ridiculous premise, that while it still does work, it is weakened by the repetitive nature and lack of new features compared to previous games. The graphics are disappointing too. You don’t expect state of the art graphics but when they’re this low resolution, it can be distracting. The story is too short and too much of a write-off, the developers could have had a wild time creating all sorts of funny stuff but instead we get some uninspired stuff. It just seems to lack the charm of the previous games.
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