The narrative focus and the story between the two main characters is easily the highlight of The Gunk though and redeems it from being a below average action-adventure game.
#Games like the gunk upgrade#
These also tie into the upgrade progression, as scanning more plant-life and architecture will net you new upgrades, but most of them are pointless and with how short the experience already is, you won't even use them all.
#Games like the gunk plus#
Collectibles are, once again, not much of a challenge, though on the plus side, it does stop them getting tedious. Doing both these things requires the exact same input though, and the enemies are incredibly easy to incapacitate, meaning you can mostly hold one button and get through these segments.Īnother lacklustre implementation was the collectible and upgrade systems. As products of the titular Gunk, you have to balance battling them and hoovering up the slime at the same time. The combat has many of the same issues, as you fight little spider-like creatures, ranged plants, and a huge charging enemy. None of the puzzles are particularly hard - which isn't necessarily a terrible thing - but it felt like there was no ramp up in difficulty, so the skills learnt along the way were hardly challenged. While many of these set pieces are engaging enough early on, their lack of challenge dulls the experience to the point of being mundane, and it eventually felt like going through the motions just to hit the next story beat. It's a satisfying loop, watching previously dead terrain spring to life in an instant, and Unreal Engine 4 represents this transformation well, with the expressive and cartoony graphics. As the slime suppresses plant life, revealing it will open entries to new areas with giant fungi and plants providing pathways and platforms. The easy parts are too easy, and the challenging parts feel too rough considering what came before.The main drive in The Gunk comes from completing puzzles and combat sections that largely intertwine with sucking up the slime that infests everything. Overall, I felt like The Gunk was a decent little game, but could have definitely benefited from another balance pass. In the final chapter, I honestly wasn’t having fun anymore, but with the finish line so close, I pushed my way through to the credits. Dying isn’t too punishing, thankfully, and despite it being a fairly recent game, I had no trouble finding a (text) walkthrough when I got stuck. However, the game takes a sharp turn in the later chapters, and it goes from being almost too simple to a level of challenge that the first part of the game in no way prepared the player for.Īs a result, the last couple of hours were a bit of a slog for me. The platforming is basic, the puzzles aren’t terribly difficult to figure out, and the combat – at least in the early game – is barely combat at all. When the landscape isn’t being smothered by gunk, it’s gorgeous. You wander around, sucking up gunk and resources, scanning the vegetation, and bit by bit, learn about this strange polluted planet. The first half or so of the game is fairly simple, and if the story doesn’t manage to captivate you, there’s unlikely to be meaty enough game play to keep you interested. It’s a fairly short game I took just over five hours to complete it. Conveniently, Rani’s power glove can suck up the gunk, clearing paths and reinvigorating the landscape. The problem they both face is the gunk, a toxic slime that is sucking the vitality out of the planet. Your partner, Becks, is a little more grounded, focused on filling up the cargo hold, while the player character is more interested in exploration. You play as Rani, half of a pair of down-on-their-luck space explorers who land on an unknown planet in search of marketable items. I wasn’t completely sure about it going in – I’m notoriously bad at platformers – but I was pleased to discover that it leaned more towards story and exploration than either puzzling or platforming. Coming off of a pretty significant binge of games where you clean things up, The Gunk seemed to be a good choice for something to ease me back into something, well, a little more game-like.
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