As a child who spent his formative years in the fourth and fifth console generations, local multiplayer has a special place in my heart that online gameplay has never been able to fill. It’s unlikely it will ever fill it, there’s something really powerful about having your opponent’s corporeal form present during a game. The trash talk can still flow, the shouting can be even louder than through a headset, but maybe you’ll both be just a little less graphic when describing the sexual prowess you each exhibited upon the other player’s mother the night before.
Your mom is a super lady.
But of all the systems where I expected to see local multiplayer make its grand comeback the PC was the last one. I know I don’t speak for everyone but I think it’s generally assumed that most people don’t have a gaming rig hooked up in their living room. But if there is indeed a market for four people to crowd around a 17″ monitor in someone’s home office then games like Towerfall, Nidhogg, DiveKick, and Samurai Gunn are here to scratch that itch.
Samurai Gunn riffs a lot off Towerfall which to the uninitiated is a fairly straight forward four man all-out projectile based brawl. Think Smash Bros except one hit kills you, everyone is Link, and you only get three arrows. So how does Samurai Gunn stand apart from Towerfall? Well with swords for a start. Your Samurai warrior will have two weapons at his disposal, a trusty sword with which to swing, and a pistol with three bullets. Each weapon can be used in any four basic directions, which is good because the nature of the levels means that oftentimes your opponent can be found above or below you.
But shooting and stabbing isn’t the only important thing you’ll be doing in Samurai Gunn, there’s also jumping, a lot of it. Levels have a Pac-Man-esque mechanic to them where the edges connect. Drop down a pit in a level and you’ll find yourself re-appearing at the top side of the map. Characters also have a very effective wall jump which contributes in making this a much more vertical game than traditional brawlers.
Combat in Samurai Gunn is easy to understand and pick up which makes it a great party game. There’s only three buttons to learn and the game is fast paced and frantic enough that even the worst player is going to pull off a kill or two to make them feel good.
But a little bit of fun combat is pretty much all Samurai Gunn has to offer. The game is so lacking in features that I sometimes wonder if the developer forgot to check the “Early Access” box when submitting it to Steam. Let’s start with gameplay modes, of which you get two: Versus and Survival. Versus mode is your traditional four player brawl which of course will require four local friends. In Survival mode you and up to four people will be pitted against increasingly difficult AI opponents on standard levels of your choosing. There is no online play and although Survival mode can be played as single player, the fairly weak AI makes for a pretty hollow feeling experience.
You do have some say in how battles are won. You can choose between 10 stock lives, or you can give everyone unlimited lives and the first person to 10 kills wins. Those are the only two choices though. Want shorter or longer matches? Tough luck.
Another complaint the group I played with had was that when you get a kill the entire screen freezes for a split second and highlights the victim and his assailant. This looks really cool but in a four person match it can be really distracting when the entire screen goes black except for a sliver every few seconds. Again following our theme of limited options there is no way to turn this off in the menus.
If at the end of a match two players are tied then the game will declare that it is time for a showdown! Showdowns are one on one battles on simplified maps that illicit a feeling akin to the dramatic climax between hero and villain in an action movie. They’re actually really cool and stripping the levels down helps the players focus on timing and skill. Unfortunately though there’s no way to use the showdown maps without going through a regular match first and ties are very rare. We actually never encountered one naturally during our play and had to deliberately set one up to get a look at it.
Hold that thought, I have to look cool for a moment.
A lot of this would be okay were the game priced out differently, but as it stands there’s simply not enough here to justify the asking price of $14.99. Nidhogg is the same price, significantly more feature rich, (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write) and produced just as many laughs and good times as Samurai Gunn, if not more.
As with most of the other games mentioned in this article your mileage really goes as far as your list of friends. If you have a big group of friends, a PC hooked up to a tv, and multiple controllers then you could definitely do a lot worse than a few hours of Samurai Gunn. If you’re looking for anything other than exactly that then you should be taking that fifteen bucks elsewhere.
