Enter the Gungeon Is A Bullet Hell Roguelike That’s Worth Playing Even If You Hate Shooters
Xbox Game Pass gets trigger happy with a new addition.
It’s hard to find a simpler, more worn-out idea in video games than “shoot a bunch of guys with guns.” After often skipping school to play games like Halo in friends’ basements, giving me guns in a character’s hands is one of the quickest ways to get me to stop paying attention these days. Even still, a shooter comes along once in a while that makes engaging in a little pew-pew action actually engaging, and one of the best is now available on Xbox Game Pass.
There may not be a game that’s as much about guns as Enter the Gungeon. There are hundreds of guns to add to your arsenal, enemies and even your currency take the form of bullets, and even the title spells out the game’s obsession with firearms. While that admittedly makes me feel a little gross, awash as we are in America’s unhealthy fixation on guns and its horrible consequences, Enter the Gungeon ends up feeling much more palatable than similarly shooter-obsessed games like Call of Duty.
Enter the Gungeon has a massive, surprisingly varied arsenal.
That’s partly because the game maintains a whimsical tone, despite all the carnage on display, and partly because it has an extremely loose definition of what guns even are. Sure, there are your typical revolvers and assault rifles and shotguns. But cactuses, pillows, fish, and pitchforks — yep, they’re all guns, too. That wild variety is part of the fun of Enter the Gungeon, and one of its greatest joys is picking up a new weapon for the first time, pulling the trigger, and having absolutely no idea what will happen as a result. Exploding bananas, launchable beehives, and lasers that destroy enemy bullets are all on the table, and that’s hardly scratching the surface.
It’s a good thing that there’s so much variety in Enter the Gungeon’s arsenal, because you’re going to be revisiting its five levels quite a bit if you want to finish the game. It’s a roguelike, so it’s designed to be replayed, but it’s a particularly punishing one as well, meaning you’d better get used to being sent back to the start. That difficulty can skew from challenging to outright annoying at times, but fortunately the game is fun enough to keep those frequent resets from getting too annoying.
Brutal bosses are some of Enter the Gungeon’s biggest highlights.
Each stage in Enter the Gungeon is procedurally generated, in typical roguelike fashion, and even its bosses aren’t always predictable. Each stage has a small pool of bosses that might appear at the end, so while only a few are available on a given level, not knowing which one will appear means every trip through will go a little differently. Like its weapons, Enter the Gungeon’s bosses span a wide range of inventive possibilities, from a body-builder bird that simply sprays the entire arena with gatling gunfire to a gorgon with a paralyzing stare.
Fittingly for a game soaked in guns, Enter the Gungeon borrows from the bullet hell genre, where games like Ikaruga challenge players to avoid screen-filling patterns of projectiles. Making liberal use of your dodge roll, trusting your reflexes, and choosing the perfect moment to make your counterattack are all skills that will be essential if you ever want to make it to the end. The sheer volume of bullets can be overwhelming at times, making Enter the Gungeon a little draining when it really sucks you in.
But while its difficulty can be a turn-off, Enter the Gungeon is still a blast, most of the time. It does suffer a bit from the heavy repetition required to reach the end, but every run has something to teach you, even if it’s only which specific enemy is most likely to make your life hell the next time around. Now that it’s on Game Pass, it’s easier than ever to fall for the bullet-riddled charms of Enter the Gungeon.
