Gunvalkyrie

Pros • Often have your choice between more than one mission, so if you get too frustrated by one, you can go bang your head against another for a "break" • Little exploration extras to reward the obsessive-compulsive • Platform hopping elements make for more gameplay variety (and much extra frustration) • Interesting variety of indoor, outdoor, and underground environments • Contains the requisite boss battles, that besides being good, absolutely force you to learn the controls • Cool mecha-insectoid enemies and a fair variety to them • Slick and shiny graphics, special effects, and animations	Cons • Missions mostly have very artificial goals; how often is it actually a military objective to kill every enemy--especially within a given time limit? • Any sense of urgency to the combat has more to do with the unwieldy controls than the enemy forces • Only two playable characters to choose from • Clumsy, thumbs-a-fumblin', unpredictable, and difficult to learn controls • The story is told in text boxes that, really, add nothing to the game • No enemy AI beyond charging straight at the player • Rapidly reaches frustration overload • No multiplayer game
Bottom Line Although slick, Gunvalkyrie just doesn't provide enough rewards to make the drag on your butt through its briar patch of prickly controls worthwhile for most gamers. Gunvalkyrie is a graphically impressive shooter, where the gamer looks over the shoulder of a cyber-suited uber-warrior splatting her or his way through swarms of giant mecha-inspired insectoid enemies, as well as leaping and boosting from platform to platform on the path of a mysterious Dr. Hebble Gate, which you can... Nevermind, because the story is poorly related and has no real bearing on the run-and-leap-and-gun gameplay. What does have a bearing, and which restrains Gunvalkyrie from being an outstanding game, is the difficulty of the controls. Yes, the controls are deep, and you have a lot of maneuvers to master. It often feels, though, as you curse and hurl your controller across the room (careful, those Xbox monstrosities are heavy and break things) like you might as well play with your toes.

Gunvalkyrie is an undoubtedly stylish and interesting game. It is graphically very rich, with luscious landscapes and vegetation that feels alien and living, solid industrial areas, and strange, hallucinogenic, swirling, purple swamps. Character animations are beyond smooth, right down to bracing for the recoil before firing heavy weapons, which big effin' guns flame and spark and cause explosions as they fire. Heat from the blue flames of your character's booster shimmers in the air, and a ridiculous little winged Orca flutters in the corner of menu screens (hey, don't ask me, I only report on Sega's games). This is a very impressive looking and even sounding game. And, the developers at Sega's Smilebit studios tried to spice up the run-and-gun genre by splicing in a few platformer genes. Unfortunately, the genetically-modified result of their experimentation, Gunvalkyrie--and yes, I know Sega capitalizes all the letters in the game's name, but anyone with even limited Internet savvy knows writing all in caps is simply an artificial, adolescent, and annoying attempt at attention, which as a marketing ploy I reject--controls about like the Frankengame it is.

The problem isn't in the running, nor in the gunning, which work fine; but rears its fun-fumbling face in the platform-hopping aspects of the game. Smilebit obviously left out a few crucial genes, because most gamers will find their onscreen character spurting and fitting, boosting in wrong directions at wrong times, banging into the lips of ledges that need to be landed upon, and otherwise conniption-fitting about the screen. The "boost" jets of a Gunvalkyrie operative's suit work much like the boost jets of Sega's Virtual On games, blasting the character at jet-propelled speed in one single straight-line direction at a time. You can leap into the air, boost in any direction, hover, flip and roll in the air to dodge enemy fire and fire your own weapons all at the same time. Assuming of course, you've the dexterity and patience to master it, which, quite honestly, given the very little guidance and instruction provided by anything resembling a tutorial or the manual, not many gamers will have. More frequently, you will be cursing and heaving the controller about the room feeling like you might as well play with your feet for all the difference it makes. Much of said frustration arises from trying to make small adjustments to the right or left or backwards to avoid overshooting a platform you are trying to land on, inadvertently boosting too far in said direction and back and forth again until the platform fades from sight far above a frustrated and falling-to-the-ground you, or boosting forward when you needed to simply jump up, which never feels like your fault, but a caprice of the control scheme, especially since it tends to happen only on the last or second-to-last leap in a long series.

If you're the Braer Rabbit type, though, who can finger your way through the most convoluted twelve-step combo in any fighting game, with a little patience to master Gunvalkyrie's prickly control scheme, you'll find, here, a game that will definitely please and challenge your gaming chops.

It's not, unfortunately, just in the controls that Gunvalkyrie misses. There's no multiplayer option, and only two selectable characters: the quick-moving, sexy-bummed, upside-down-bunny-eared, only-missing-the-cotton-tail, playmate Kelly, or the weirdly-named, walking-tank, muscle-head Saburouta. The story is told through text boxes, when even voice-acted, game-engine cut-scenes would have made the background to all the shooting much more appealing. Even the levels, though creative with all the platform hopping, frustrating as it most-often is, lack logic. Kill everything in the area in under thirty minutes may make the area more challenging, but it isn't exactly a common military objective; it just feels artificial, which could have been relieved with any little cut-scene explaining that some thing or one important was scheduled to arrive, or occur in exactly thirty minutes: ready or not, here I come. And the upgrade scheme is fairly interesting, it just, again, is nowhere explained, and the odds are you'll realize after the first few levels that you really should not have spent all of your hard-earned credits on the upgraded "Plasma Hook," no matter how cool it sounds, and have to restart the game to better apply your upgrades; again, unnecessarily frustrating.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with an otherwise impressive game: it's just too unnecessarily frustrating. Gunvalkyrie simply should have had a little more polishing. It's worth a rental for most gamers, and the few, the 1337, the proud and extremely dexterous, will find in Gunvalkyrie's briar patch a game that meets and rewards their mad skills in spades while the rest of us pick the nettles from our stinging backsides.

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