Galaxy Gunner is a 2D Fighter centered around the act of weapon-based combat. It takes place in a space vessel far from Earth and sees an alien burrow its way in. I can’t tell you more about the premise or story as it is solely in Japanese, yet the plot is barely there in the first place. When selecting someone from the six-character roster, we receive a bit of dialogue and a tad more if we manage to defeat the alien. It is a gameplay first type of ordeal, meaning those of us that don’t understand Japanese can easily enjoy it without missing out on much of anything.
One of the first things those familiar with the genre is likely to look up are the character movesets. There are none here. It features a basic overall moveset without any complex inputs. Each press of this four-button fighter is specified to a single action. We have one for melee, another to use our sub-weapon, and one to fire our primary gun. The fourth button pulls double duty as it is both the grab button and the one we use to reload while completely stationary. Some of these may have different effects depending on if you are crouching, standing, or mid-air. You can attack low with melee, as an example, but it is still a single button press without any further moves to it while crouching.
When it comes to melee, it is more of a form of self-defense as you try to get breathing room to reload your weapon. Nearly every character has short three-strike combos by tapping the melee button, and managing to connect all three will briefly knock down a foe. In those valuable seconds of respite, you can dash out of melee range, reload, or make use of your sub-weapon. Sub-weapons are an interesting mechanic. Much like your melee attacks, sub-weapons do not do much damage by themselves. They can be used to connect combos with your other forms of attacks, but will more commonly be used as a denial of movement to control the play area. You have things such as land mines to control where foes can safely step, flinging dynamite that detonates after some time forcing your opponent to move, or explode on impact grenades. It solely depends on your chosen character. That, alongside your primary weapon, are one of the key factors of differentiating characters that all share the same combat structure.
This is a four-button fighter, yet you have two macros that you’ll be using as much as any other button. Our first macro is a special attack for our weapon that uses half of our total ammo in the magazine every time it is used. We have infinite ammo, but the act of reloading is when you are most vulnerable and something you likely don’t want to be constantly doing. This game is quite fast-paced. If your foe is out of ammo, then that is where melee truly shines as you lay the pressure while unloading your own magazine into her to deny them the chance to reload. Weapons are the primary form of damage, so going heavy into an opponent without ammo is a pretty advantageous thing to do. They can try to use melee to knock you away, use a sub-weapon, or a grab. None will damage you much, so these defensive uses are the main function of other attack methods.
When it comes to your second macro, it is mapped to your ultimate attack. It requires nothing on your part other than to survive long enough for it to fill up on its own. Once you have the OK sign on that meter, that is when things tend to get tense. Remember that hypothetical situation of attacking an enemy without ammo? Well, these ultimate attacks do not require ammo, meaning you very well could be rushing into a trap. What this ultimate move is depends on the character and whether they’re in the air or ground, but are not to be underestimated. If you don’t block or avoid it, then chances are about 40% of your health will be obliterated right then and there. Knowing what your foe’s ultimate attacks are is vital to understand how to defend yourself. Some characters require you to be in grabbing range, while others go berserk from across the screen. With only six characters, learning them won’t take long. However, the mind games are real when both sides have their meter charged, ready to change the flow of battle or end it.
There are no invisibility frames in Galaxy Gunners. An opponent laying on the ground is an easy target, as are you. You can be shot while on the ground and beaten with melee. This isn’t the type of title where it’s beneficial to play dead, or you’ll actually end up being killed by not getting up to fight back as soon as possible. Heck, they don’t even have to attack you. You could just be giving them time to set up land mines or making use of their sub-weapons in other ways that will make taking them on much more dangerous. At the same time, rushing in carelessly can get you beaten to a pulp, thanks to the same lack of invisibility frames. The controls schemes are simple, but don’t let that blind you to how in-depth a Fighter without quarter-circles can be.
As in-depth as combat may be, it will take a while until you need to put any effort into it. Once you pick a character, it will take you through a series of six matches. It is not until you defeat the final alien boss that the game will repeat these six fights in a hard mode. That is when the title really picks up and kicks off the training wheels. The AI will become far more aggressive while utilizing their abilities better. Button mashing is unlikely to get you far on hard, and being overly aggressive without defending is ill-advised. You can always press a specific button combination to exit hard mode if you don’t want to partake in it. The story is done, and there is no additional content to see. It is solely there for those that want to make full use of what they’ve learned throughout. I do wish there was a way to start in hard mode without having to go through six uninteresting fights first, however.
After enough time playing, you’ll notice that we always fight the same character in a precise pattern. We always fight Mika first, then Julia and Yuna after. There are only six characters, but it still would have been nice to put them in a random order each time we boot up Story mode. It makes sense that the alien is always last, though not the rest. While I’m on the topic of negatives, let me mention that despite the pretty in-depth combat, it is not a pure fighter. At times it feels more like a party game thanks to how fast the Ultimate attack meter fills up. Thanks to it just filling up on its own, one really only needs to turtle in a corner until you have access to it. Having ten sub-weapon uses per round is a bit absurd too. Even having ten per entire match may be a tad much, but per round? Projectile spam becomes a real nuisance that occasionally invalidates any strategy. I have frequently switched opinions into whether I would consider this as a pure fighter or a party game, and to this moment, I’m still conflicted. The main issue here is how rapidly the ultimate meter fills up, more so than blocking limited spam or getting past cheesy tactics.
So what about the hentai? Well, that is mainly exclusive to the roster’s evil side, including Ashley, Ganz, and Xenon. You need to pick one of them as a character and defeat your foe in a match. Once you win the second round, your opponent becomes dazed and helpless, no longer able to fight. It is then that you can interact with her by pressing the grab button to sexually violate them on the spot. You are then greeted with a fully animated scene that will not end until you press the C button. While in there, you can increase the tempo by pressing the button B or swap to another position with A. There are only two positions despite whatever character you are having sex with. Both Ganz and Ashley share the same animations too. The only difference there being if you want to see a male or a futanari. When it comes to Xenon, things get considerably more violent with his two unique animations. One would have him harshly shoving his tentacles into a woman, and the other will have her being electrocuted. If you’ve been keeping count, that is only four animations. It is pretty light on H content.
This title takes some influence from Mortal Kombat, in that every character has a finisher once they defeat an enemy. It plays out much the same as engaging in sex. Simply defeat your foe in two rounds, and she’ll become helpless. You can continue to beat her around if you want, as she tries to crawl away and weeps. It is an excellent way to practice up on your moves, morbid as that sounds. Do as you please, but there is no escaping the inevitable. It is necessary to finish off an opponent unless you want to spend ages beating her helpless self around until her life-bar is empty. All you have to do is press the macro that you’d use for your ultimate attack to grab her and then proceed to ending her life in an over-the-top fashion. It involves things such as shoving dynamite into her vagina. Burning her to death while crushing her with a mechanical claw. Or jamming a tentacle so far into her vagina that it erupts through her stomach.
With the fatalities, most of them involve vaginas, as you may have glimmered from that last paragraph. This means that we can not use a fatality on Gatz, the only male, or Xenon who is an alien. While it does get tiring finishing people off since you are forced to do it and have a single fatality animation per character, that still sucks. Speaking of, this may be explained if you understand Japanese, but I always found it strange how the final boss fight violates our character after we beat him. It would make more sense if they handled it like in their other game, Monmusu Fight, in where you get violated beforehand. That gives you all the more incentive to lay the beat down on your final foe. My best guess is they were going for a bad ending regardless of how hard your character fought, which still feels off given it boots us straight into another fight on hard mode after.
The four female characters do have a few unique CGs as they are violated at the end. It can get pretty dark as some are forced to birth tiny aliens or whatever the bloody hell happened to Ashley. I’m nearly certain that all that happened to our resident blue futanari was getting jacked off by a mechanical claw. Curse my lack of knowing Japanese as that ending threw me off a little compared to what happened to the rest. In any case, if we get tired of story mode, we have access to two others. The first is a Versus mode to fight a friend or someone online if we bother to set up the external components necessary for it. Your other mode is Practice, which does exactly what the name implies. It is a tad useless given that we can freely beat an opponent after winning a single match to learn our character’s ins and outs. Still, I’d rather it be included than not have it. We only have three stages to choose from, and we need to select them from the Options tab in the game’s window. As gorgeous as the graphics are, the small amount of background variation is a negative.
Galaxy Gunners is made in the ‘2D Fighter Maker’ engine. It suffers many of the flaws you can expect from it, such as being unable to go into fullscreen. You will need a third-party program like Lossless Scaling to emulate a full-screen experience. This title is gamepad compatible, yet you will need to make it a priority via the Device Manager section of your OS if you have used more than one controller type on your PC. With all that being said, I found Galaxy Gunner to be a pretty unique fighter. It borders the line of being a party game with some of its balance issues, yet it is undoubtedly fun regardless. I loved the tactical aspect of needing to make use of a weapon with limited ammo and using every trick you have in your sleeve to try to reload. Every character plays differently enough that you will need to adapt depending on your current foe. Some can dash far greater distances when you double-tap a direction, others lack a knock-back effect in their melee, and much more small quirks I’ll leave for you to discover. I was underwhelmed by the hentai content, yet the underlying gameplay had me gladly playing for far more time than I needed to. Galaxy Gunners has that ‘if everyone is overpowered, then nobody is overpowered’ vibe with enough skill still involved to make it a heck of an interesting fighter.
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