Guns Up! is a game developed by Valkyrie Entertainment and published by the one and only Sony Computer
Entertainment. And- it’s a free to play game.
Now I know what you’re all thinking- oh, god no, not free to play. Fuck that shit!
Well, like it or lump it, free to play games are an important part of the modern gaming
industry. Just like PlayStation Boss, Scott Rohde told Kinda Funny Games- there are kids
out there who know nothing but free to play games.
With the rise of mobile gaming and with the endless supply of free online games, the thought
to some kids of actually going out and buying a game seems madness!
And since it’s such a lucrative market, it only makes sense for Sony to try and get
in and get a piece of the action. After all, King, the developers of the insanely popular,
free to play Candy Crush Saga were sold in 2015 for a whopping $5.9 BILLION! That is
insane. To put that in perspective, Marvel was sold for only $4 billion. Star Wars, fucking
Star Wars only went for $4.05 billion!
But forget about all that for a moment, forget about free to play, forget about money…
Let’s just review this game without spending a penny. I’m gonna review it exactly as
it stands. I’m not even going to download the PS Plus stuff for it. So, Guns Up!- is
it any good?
Now I’ve got to say right off the bat, that the production value here is top notch. The
music’s good, the menus and graphics are nice.
The game starts off with a pretty decent tutorial, which is good, because at first, there is
a lot to learn.
Gameplay is simple enough. You could in fact say, that maybe it’s a little too simple.
It’s kind of a cross between a tower defense game and a strategy game. Your truck moves
across the screen from the left to right. You have to create units from this truck.
The units have to attack and destroy everything in their path in order to reach the enemy
HQ, which they then have to blow the fuck out off. Mission complete! But you have no
control over these little guys- they kind of just do their own thing. The strategy side
of things comes down to what you build and when you build it.
You can also pick up a bunch of special moves. You’ve got airstrikes, tear gas, focused
fire… all of these are extremely useful in taking out the key enemy strong points,
and are often the main difference between winning and losing.
Things can get very repetitive- the battles are all virtually the same; on the same background
and with only a handful of different units, specials and buildings. It’s all quite mindless.
But despite lacking on content, it is strangely addictive.
So onto the menus then. OK, let’s run through all this. You’ve got the depot- this is
where you can purchase stuff. As you can see, you can either buy stuff with munitions or
with gold. Munitions are attained easily enough by completing missions, but gold? Well, here’s
where the bullshit fee to pay mumbo-jumbo starts to seep in- gold is the thing that
you can buy with real money. It’s the micro transaction unit. You can use it to buy pretty
much anything in the game, from customizing your unit’s clothes, to buying boosters,
to buying bundles, to renting out units. All of this stuff is technically not necessary,
but we’ll come to that in a bit.
Next, you’ve got cards. When you complete a mission, you earn some cards, which you
can then use at the start of missions in order to help you out with stuff like extra weapons
or health boosts. Stuff like that. Or, you can combine 3 cards together in order to try
and create a better one.
The game also features 3 daily missions. Fun! Up until the point that you complete them-
then you have to wait til the end of the day to get 3 more. Or, of course, you could always
pay to get new ones early. It never misses an opportunity to make you pay!
Next, the barracks. Here you can play around with your troops, unlock some new ones. Each
unit can be upgraded with perks, leveled up with valour points and each has their own
set of challenges to complete. It may appear that the gold isn’t really necessary here,
i.e. you don’t have to pay money to upgrade your troops. However, I found Valour points
to be extremely rare, so using gold to purchase the rarest card packs, would probably be the
best way to get hold of them.
As well as attacking in the game, you also get to try your hand at defending. Here, you
have to build up your base, improve your towers and fight off enemies who attack periodically.
Unfortunately your base is full of shit like trees and rocks, which you can’t move. They
block your space, so you can’t put down as many defenses. When you start to unlock
some dynamite, you can start blowing that shit up. Thankfully, dynamite wasn’t too
hard to come by, so I could clear the area out pretty swiftly.
At level 6, you can unlock this horde mode where you have to survive endless waves of
enemies for as long as possible. The longer you survive, the more you unlock. It is kind
of depressing to see all your hard work blown to pieces in a matter of minutes, but hey-
at least everything is fully recovered at the end of each attempt.
The mortars are kind of a pain in the ass though. It would be better if you could somehow
aim them, I mean, what the fuck are they meant to be shooting at here? In fact, what am I
even doing here? Other than the specials, there is literally nothing for me to do but
to watch!
So everything was going fine I guess... up until around level 11. It was around this
point that things started to grind to a halt- grind being the key word here. All the gold
that the game teased me with at the start was gone, with no more in sight. Levels weren’t
adding anything new. XP bars weren’t growing up as much. Because I wasn’t unlocking new
stuff, it felt like I was doing the same thing over and over and over again, which is bullshit,
because at level 12 you unlock cool units like rangers and flamethrower guys.
It kind of felt like, OK, you’ve had a taste of the game, now you’re gonna need to pay.
Because realistically, to get back into the swing of things, I was going to have to pay
to get a double XP boost or something like that, which, of course, costs money.
Now there’s nothing wrong with spending money on a game. If you enjoy it and think
that it’s worth it, go for it. Personally, I just didn’t find the gameplay here to
be fun enough to warrant buying gold. And with these games, it can sometimes become
a slippery slope. Potentially you could end up spending literally hundreds on this, and
suddenly free to play becomes quite an ironic term.
As I said then, spend what you’re willing to spend. You could of course spend nothing,
but I do feel like it’s designed in such a way to make your life pretty difficult if
you don’t pay up. But hey, I guess business is business!
At its heart, this isn’t a bad game. Its problem is just that it doesn’t have that
much content. There’s not enough variety to anything, so you’ll quickly get bored.
And it’s like a vicious circle; you’re bored so you want new units, but to get more
units you need to do more levels, but doing more levels gets you more bored. And so on.
Oh and one more thing though- some of these trophies are DEFINITELY easier if you pay
money. Which is a bit dodgy Sony- don’t make trophies something that you can end up
buying! We love them too much for that shit.