A brief VG review,

Alright, it seems I've put this off for a while, so this is that brief review on Gunbound that I wrote some time ago but never got around to posting:

Okay, so a few people have convinced me to give "Gunbound", my old gaming nemesis, a try. So, I went to "ijji" and downloaded myself a client of the game's latest version: "Gunbound Revolution". What exactly makes it a "revolution" is still beyond me; the game still looks fundamentally like what it was years ago and issues with gameplay have not improved a bit. Now let's get into the actual game...

Gunbound falls into the slightly crowded category of "Free MMOs" that seem to have taken power in the past few years due to World of Warcraft's domination over the pay-to-play MMO market. As such, it is loaded with the typical issues you would find in around 99.9% of them:

1) Horrible balancing
2) Bad translations (assuming the game is from a foreign country.. or that the writing team is not composed of Forestry Majors)
3) Ugly visuals
4) Bad music
5) Unintuitive/Confusing Menu System

Okay, so points 3 and 4 can be forgiven since the game IS free and the designers probably could not afford the best programmers or musicians.. but really, FLASH games can get away with having more streamlined menus. Not only is the placement of everything mind-blowing in the actual game, but at times, the sheer ugliness of the menus would block actual text. I remember at one point in the tutorial, I was quizzed on the type of weapon that was most effective against "Bio" tanks. This would have been a reasonable question had the "bio" part not been blocked by the retarded window frame. What the lady actually said was something along the lines up "What type of damage is most effective against". Right.. Moving on.

Good unit balance: the core of any good game. First of all, the tanks in Gunbound are not balanced. Some are obviously horribly useless and serve no purpose other than as novelty choices and bragging rights (for the game, not for the player). The fact that the game even offers "hidden" super tanks (according to someone I talked to) proves that the design team never had the intention of making the game Furthermore, implementation of "real money items" is unacceptable.

My last point, as I don't quite feel like getting too technical: The community sucks. HARD. This is probably the one thing that has given me a bad opinion of the game years and years ago back when it was still new. If you play on Xbox Live, you will no doubt be aware of the annoying little brats that scream high-pitched profanity into their mics all day long in order to make themselves sound older (I like to call them "squeakers". Well, as far as I can tell, virtually every player on this game is one of "those". There are no helpful people on this game. Every single round is an endless wave of noob-unfriendly trolling and I'll be damned if I try being nice to them again.

So, for some scores (based on my "free online game" standards):

Gameplay: 8/10

It's a neat concept and quite addictive. The balancing issue really brings the game down but at least skill has more weight than experience in the combat.

Graphics: 6/10

Okay, so the game is old. That's the one excuse that I can think of for the utterly crap presentation on this thing. Menus are ugly, display is unintuitive, characters look boring, and the fancy power items look tacky and just plain "bad". Aside from the obvious design flaws, the one gameplay-hindering flaw is the actual battle screen. The fact that you can stack on top of other players is a bad design decision. Seriously. Why can't you just land on top of people or bump up next to them? Allowing players to overlap make the already ugly sprites indistinguishable from each other. The team indication sucks too; colouring your name red or blue in really narrow text barely does the job.

Storyline: 0/10

I can't find any obvious story in this game, but this is probably a good thing. Gunbound seems to be the kind of game that doesn't need a storyline to do what it does best. Any attempt at explaining why everyone spends all their time shooting robots at each other in strangely inaccurate tanks will be a bad one.

Sound: 4/10

Oh dear. A bad soundtrack that loops itself at the most obvious and inappropriate times? Boo. I can do better on my iPhone apps. The sound effects are fair but I've heard better explosions from a free game.

Longevity: 8/10

I can understand getting addicted to this game. It doesn't really have any replay value, but people will definitely want to keep playing this if they don't have any better games in hand or if all their friends are playing it.


Overall (not an average): 7/10