Initially frustrating, eventually rewarding

When you first boot up Gunvalkyrie, you’ll find that its controls are very awkward . This fast-paced arcade style third-person shooter uses tank controls and an aiming system akin to FPS’ on N64. It’s all very stiff to a new player. Enemies will fly around and surround you as you try to orient yourself to even see what they’re hitting you with.

I started to question this games’ cult status. Gunvalkyrie isn’t fun when you don’t know how to play. But eventually, you slowly start to uncover the mechanics that make this game so special.

The boost combo gauge was my first hint on the intended way to play. Boosting in any direction while in the air fills the gauge by one. Touching the ground, taking damage (sometimes?), or hovering resets the gauge to zero. Left and right dodges have more frames, while forward and backward can be cancelled instantaneously with another dodge. Mashing the stick in random directions without any timing causes you to get disoriented and accidentally hover causing the gauge to reset. But if you calmly time your boosts, you can quickly power up your weapon to the max.

It can be quite technical to do this during gameplay. Enemies have various attack that must be dodged with good timing, and knowing where the enemies are can be challenging do to the camera. Much like Clover Studios’ God Hand, player positioning and camera orientation is paramount to successfully dealing with foes. Clicking the right stick enables the player to turn in 90° or 180°. Sometimes taking your time to reset with these moves is better than just hoping the enemy doesn’t hit you.

These mechanics are quite technical. Putting all these techniques together isn’t easy. Your first playthrough will marred by just getting Kelly to do what you want her to do, but it all comes together.

The floor is lava in Gunvalkyrie. Staying above the enemies combining boosts to power up while simultaneously dodging foes is the name of the game. Calmly navigating the arena with boost combos and then dispatching all foes with the coveted ♾️ gauge never gets old.

The arcade style rating system ensures that playing the most fun way is also the most effective way. This is really important in my opinion. You could stand in one place and blast everything with the drive gun, but you’ll be met with a terrible rating and a difficulty spike in the second half of the game. The rating system also gives a lot of replay value. GV keeps track of just about everything.

Even when firmly in GV’s “fun zone”, there are still some minor issues:
- Later platforming-focused stages are still annoying. These levels have extremely far jumps and falling results in effectively restarting the level. They also do not intertwine well with the combo boost combat. I don’t believe these few levels play to Gunvalkyrie’s strengths.
- Aiming while flying is still cumbersome, even with all the praise I’ve given this games’ combat
- In the levels where you must eliminate all enemies, map usage is paramount. Opening the map every 5 seconds is inconvenient and breaks the flow.
- The addition of a second playable character is odd to me. It’s suggested and advertised to play as Kelly, the female protagonist. You can’t even use Sab in boss battles. It feels a bit forced.
- There’s no frame rate issues, but there’s slowdown issues. Slowdown changes the timing of boost combos which can result in dropping combos unfairly. This only occurs on two boss fights

The poor player conveyance is unforgivable. Even with the manual, it’s significantly below acceptable levels for a game with mechanics like these. That aside, Gunvalkyrie is the very definition of a hidden gem. It’s satisfying. It’s rewarding. It’s technical. You get out what you put in.

8/10

I’d also like to shoutout @gsifdgs for their review. It helped me understand some of the mechanics better. Thanks.

Jet pack bug exterminator the game


Pretty cool even with some annoyances. Gunvalkyrie is a 3rd person shooter/3d platformer hybrid. It requires you to navigate large maps taking out every enemy you see while exploring and platforming with a cool jet pack. Controls are weird at first but pretty smooth when you get the hang of it. It’s a satisfying little run n gun shooter that will have you exploring big environments and making good use out of your jet pack. It’s pretty fun and satisfying to switch back and forth between the blaster and machine gun to take out a army of giant ants. The loop of platforming then combat challenge is fun but when both are combined in some rooms it can become a great experience.

However when I say you have to kill every enemy I mean it. Your goal is to exterminate every enemy which is pretty fun and adds some slight puzzle elements as you have to learn to find the location of each enemy yet again using your abilities (and the map to help you out.) Howeevr it can be a little tedious with how often you have to check said map just to find some random enemies off to a corner and trust me you don’t want to miss like 2 enemies and have to backtrack back that can be annoying.
The lack of weapons is a let down too. I said the combat is fun but it easily could have been more fun and replayable if you could have a load out of weapons to pick from.

Visually this game is really cool. It sorta feels like Metroid with a Steampunk flair. Looks really cool. I like those valleys with those big mushrooms and that northern light sky. And those steampunk bases are cool too.


Even with some gameplay annoyances this game is pretty fun and has a cool style. I really wish this could have gotten a sequel but as it stands its an Xbox hidden gem.

Solid 4/5
Sega bring Kelly and Saburouta back.

possibly the most dreamcast-esque title to end up on the xbox, specifically in that bizarre control scheme. left trigger jump, right trigger shoot, different weapons mapped to the different face buttons (except for A, which goes conspicously unused), tank controls on left stick, inverted constrained camera on right stick, and boosting on the left stick button. there's a little bit of "you'll get used to it," but man is it a completely asinine control scheme that both simultaneously wastes valuable controller space and feels clunky up through the end game. an action TPS without strafing is already difficult enough, and somehow they managed to bungle it even more by tying so many necessary actions to stick buttons (the tank controls are not terrible on their own but still awkward). the mercury crash move required for the final boss (which requires both aiming yourself as a projectile in 3D and clicking both sticks in simultaneously while already in the air) is truly where I snapped on this.

it's a real shame too, because the boost mechanics are genuinely interesting and add some much needed flavor to an otherwise bland experience. while moving vertically expends fuel, boosting in the x-y plane is virtually free for the initial portion, and the game encourages you to spam alternating boosts to charge your special gauge and power up your weapons. the sense of speed you get from drifting across rocks like they're ice or flying across a giant map in seconds is absolutely the crux of this experience as a whole, and it's relatively glitch-free to boot. it's unfortunate that most of the platforming requires expending most of the fuel slowly flying up to reach platforms that seem placed to frustrate players getting used to the odd controls. it also does not help that stopping mid-boost requires snapping back on the analog stick, which often does not register properly resulting in either a full-speed fall or a misaligned hover.

the actual shooting mechanics are relatively downplayed thanks to there being only two guns, infinite ammo, and more than a smidge of auto-aim. most of the actual gameplay instead consists of panning the limited camera around waiting for a target enemy out of range to finally snag on your lock-on since around half of the missions consist only of clearing out all enemies in an area. the other ones generally just involve reaching a destination or defeating a mini-boss, which makes even bothering to fight basic enemies pointless. even with the game's extremely short runtime there's quite a bit of level reuse over the 14 missions, and the first two bosses also get reused multiple times each. thankfully for the most part of the bosses are manageable (outside of the final boss) but given the total lack of circle strafing I would hesitate to call them "fun" per se.

thinly layered on top of all of this is a rather odd story that mixes body horror and steampunk on the surface of an alien planet; at least, this is what I gathered from the optional in-game lore, which is entirely text-only and does not really make its way into the story. the off-screen villain dr. hubble seems legitimately unnerving and disturbed from the documents he leaves behind, but since he's never seen - beyond some bizarre infant creations that would make drakengard blush - I couldn't tell you one way or the other how effective he is as an antagonist. the game stirs up some pawed-at philosophy bits with a sort of mysticism DNA splicing thing, but it's so poorly integrated with the gameplay that to even dissect it seems not worth the trouble. all of the mutated colonists you kill ad nauseum throughout the story are somehow turned back to their normal selves in the end, and I get the feeling that most of the swarms of arachnid-adjacent monsters you take on are just random aliens unmentioned by the game's narrative anyway. and no, even by the end I didn't understand why there was a whale in the gunvalkyrie logo.

if anything this game feels extremely rushed, likely because of the mid-stream development shift to the xbox. it does make me wonder how the dreamcast would have handled the game's expansive level geometry (which I might add has the interesting functionality of having scalable area walls at points, though this is extremely poorly managed by the game's physics engine, which already struggles enough with moving the player up slopes) but then again the dreamcast did not have click-in sticks so I imagine earlier prototypes played significantly differently regardless. at best this game is a brainless shooter with mildly interesting traversal features, and at its worst it frustrates the player or forces them to wade through filler that really does not belong in a game this slight. so many levels on which I considered abandoning the game altogether, although I suppose I'm glad I waited it out.

Gunvalkyrie is an odd little game. It doesn't really tell the player what kind of action game it's supposed to be; it's on the player to figure it out, and the game becomes less and less forgiving until that happens.

When I first fired up the game, I was presented with a big valley filled with bugs and giant mushrooms. I had a blaster for the bugs, complete with a Rez-style lock-on reticle, and the game told me I could use my jetpack to make my way to the top of the mushrooms by jumping, hovering, and dashing. I tank-controlled my way through the level like a bad PS1 platformer until I reached the item I was supposed to retrieve, then I turned around to make my way back to the insertion point. The way home was mainly downhill, so I decided to try and boost my way back using the jetpack, and I accidentally realized that repeatedly boosting with the right timing lets you glide around the level indefinitely. This is by design.

Gunvalkyrie does not want the player on the ground, and the ground becomes a more dangerous place over the course of the game. One level takes place above a poison swamp, and a later boss fight fills the arena floor with so many enemies resting means certain death. If you've mastered flight you become nearly untouchable, and the encounter becomes a game of boosting around and firebombing the floor-bound enemies into next week.

Halfway through the game you unlock an ability that lets you spend your fuel gauge (separate from your boost) to dash in the direction of the camera, letting you recover altitude and refill your boost bar. Conversely, boosting around builds up an aerial combo meter, and incrementing this meter replenishes your fuel. Between the two, the levels become wide open, and the game stops being much of a platformer at all. The catch of the game is that before the game "clicks", it feels like a daunting adventure motivating you with nothing but those SmileBit vibes, but once you do, the game breaks wide open and leaves you wanting a little bit more to practice your new tricks on.

I didn't really understand the story, even after reading all the in-game logs and the manual, and even if I could I think it would be a mess. You play as someone who deserted the extremist Irish Republic for the interplanetary British Empire, but the game's a little too confusing for me to figure out where they were going with that, if anywhere at all. The irony is that it's so convoluted that you can ignore the story completely, and the introduction of the final boss will be all the funnier for it.

I had a good time with Gunvalkyrie once I got over the controls. I played it on a modern Xbox, so I remapped the controls to move the stick-clicks to their respective shoulder buttons and inverted the right stick's y-axis, and movement became much more manageable. It's a neat little Xbox relic.

ooooooooooooooooohhhh dear. This game is like a stylish character action shooter, reminded me of P.N. 03 in that kinda sense. The game has a cool art direction and the vibes are absolutely on point. The problem is the controls and mechanics are waaaaaaayyy too wack for their own good. I had to make my own custom button mapping on my Xbox to have this game control comfortably. I'd also recommend using a guide to play this, just to understand the mechanics and controls that the game doesn't teach properly whatsoever. The movement is too slippery to be precise and the combat requires constant air dashing and rotations which on the default control sheme means frequently pressing the triggers, sticks, and face buttons to do what you need to do. It's kind of a sensory overload in that sense. If you can somehow wrangle the controls, there's probably a fun and rewarding little time here. But I think for most people this games probably a bit much.

I saw couple of clips in this game and said to myself. Damn I have to play it, dashing around, flying everywhere, cool weapons, now this is my kind of game!

Then I started playing... Realized this "speedy" game uses tanks controls. I said whatever let's push on. Then realized camera doesn't turn left to right, you can only do it with turning your character, camera only goes up or down and it's INVERTED, with no option to change. I get little bit anxious. Again I said let's push on, first mission was about finding a weapon and returning back, it was simple so I didn't mind it. Then the second mission came, it was about exterminating all the monsters, I said okay let's do it, then opened the map and saw trillions of red dots, also everywhere filled with enemy spawners, I also met with flying bug creatures that forces you to look up or down with the shitty camera, I get even more anxious, finishes the level finally with all sweat and tears. Looks up the timer, it says 30minutes. Seeing that, I said to myself: let me shelve this until someone makes a improved controls mod for this game(probably never gonna happen)

Edit: But then, I did the best desicion. I readed a game guide to learn more tricks. Learned to fast turn, invinsibility 25 combo and meteor attack. (funny that game doesn't explain in the game itself)

Then I opened on emulator and rebind my buttons. There is a program called ds4windows and with that, I bind l3(analog left) to r1, r3(analog right) to l1. I did this because pressing analog sticks make me frustrated after a while. Also you need to press both of them for the meteor attack and it does make things easier.

It still wasn't easy but after getting the ultimate meteor attack at the half point of the game. Game get better for me, I started to finally do some cool shit, dodge enemies, fly to the air unlimitedly, destroy enemies with super fast etc. Even with that, last two missions still kind of hard for me. Mission that before last is about a heavy enemy gauntlet that keeps spawning to protect a core and final one is the of course final boss itself. But final boss fight taught me how to use invinsibilty reliably(or forced me to learn) and the moment I learned, I kicked his head to the infinitium!

I finally learned how to enjoy at gunvalkyrie!

But still... I can't give 5/5... Why? Because...
1-even with fast turn, I still wished a free camera, especially for turning left and right. Because you have to keep using fast turn just because an enemy is a bit too left or right to lock on and it gets bad in frantic situations
2-some bad enemies. Some enemies are both super fast and small so you can get needless damage from out of the camera's side. Also there is an enemy that can go invisible, it's such an annoying enemy to fight. Because you have to wait for himself to show up again and again. Also rest of the enemies are boring ants. They are boring tbh. I would rather get enemies that are well designed and challenging to fight over quantity for the quantity sake
3-Bad map. More than half of the game's objectives are, destroy all the enemies or all the enemy spawners. It wouldn't be bad but map is 2d. But there is a lot of both vertical and horizontal maps in the game. So you know what happens most of the time? You are searching for that one damn enemy that you lost and waste your damn time
4-there is no remapping settings. I know first xbox controller have some weird quirks okay, so it would be important to give to the player an option to remap buttons also invert the camera options. But there is none. If I couldn't remap the keys with the emulator, I wouldn't continue this game. I am not kidding
5-also a locking camera to the enemy option would be nice, especially for the bosses. Because I can't count how many times I get damaged from an attack I couldn't see. For example the "A" button is unused. Why not use it for locking on to the nearest enemy? I don't understand? It still wouldn't take away from the challenge after all you need to continue dodging enemies yourself.

So yeah that's my thoughts on the game. I wish there would be a sequel with a better settings option, more varied arenas to fight and focuses on less numbered but more clever designed enemies. If this happens one day, It would make me happy with finally realizing true potential of this game.
Thanks for reading everyone!