Anyone who has followed my reviews knows that I've been willing to endure and finish some real crap, but I could feel myself physically rejecting Gungrave G.O.R.E. from the second I started the game. Maybe it's because I just got done playing Shenmue II, Sonic Frontiers, and Mario Party 2. I'm bloated from bad games, a fetid swollen mass of flesh crying in the gutter, "No more... No more...!"

I heard it described once that games don't age, we do. Our standards change, and we choose to apply them to old games that were never meant to abide by them in the first place. Gungrave G.O.R.E. is the most 2003-era budget bin video game I've seen since the early aughts, and if I try to take myself back to that headspace, I'm pretty confident I would've thought it was bad at the time.

Grave is miserable to control. You have to rapidly tap the trigger to fire your gun, which the game wants you to be doing at all times, and on that point alone I have little patience for this tendonitis simulator. Grave's dodge roll is so heavy that it feels more like he's throwing his entire body weight straight to the ground, and his missile-reflecting counter has timing that I was never quite able to get a grasp on despite missiles moving at what I would describe as a "casual stroll." Enemies are spongy, there's a lot of them, and the additional moves Grave is given to manage crowds just feel flaccid.

Also, what's up with this game stuttering like crazy at medium settings on a 3060ti? Jesus Christ.

I was so sure Sonic Frontiers would be the worst game I played this year, and in terms of games I finished it still is, but Gungrave really blew me away.