Gungrave: Overdose reviewed

Books-A-Million is weird place for they sold video games at one location...and possibly all of them.   And this is where I picked up this game I never heard of because it was only five bucks.  It looked to be short and that was fine enough with me.  Then I did some preliminary research and found out I bought a sequel to a game I never heard of and there was an anime series as well.  But like a fool, I carried on and now a couple days, multiple horrific rises in my blood pressure and a broken controller(the outside, it still controls) I ready to put Gungrave: Overdose in the grave.

*hits myself*

So apparently, three years ago there was this drug called Seed that turned people insane and sometimes into hideous monstrosities. So there was this guy called Grave, who came back from the dead with the help of some chick, Mika, to stop it.  But they weren't successful for some reason since it's the present and Seed is back.  Maybe with a vengeance or something, I don't know but I do know that you have to stop Seed again and this time, for real...maybe.  But you have help, for some reason an undead rockstar and an undead blind soldier have joined you.

The plot is just a horrible excuse anyways, so the fact that I never knew the whole story beforehand makes very little difference.  The gameplay is you go to some place, see a bunch of enemies trying to kill you and then you kill them before they kill you.  As a run-and-game, it's not bad.  It's fast-paced, the enemies are varied just enough and it provides a visceral experience.  Also, I do kinda get off on dual-wielding pistols which is Grave's weapon of choice.

Of course, I would be saying that despite it's instances of fun if it wasn't so infuriatingly difficult and annoyingly repetitive.  It's difficult because the game is cheap.  More often than not you get more enemies than you can handle and at times, you just can't shoot them, you need to use strategy.  But the game seems to punish you for trying to be strategic.  You have to strafe at times but when you need to, it's always in a small enclosed space where strafing is next-to-impossible.  You have to use your melee attacks, you get enemies giving cheap shots from behind.  You have to target something, the targeting system is such a joke that you're betting off shooting randomly.

But if there is any bright spot in playing this, it's actually watching and hearing the cutscenes.  They do have some nice anime cutscenes in this that are quite pleasing to the eye.  Now, they're more like moving paintings since motion is rather limited except in a few cases but the colors are bright, the characters are well-defined and it's just fun to watch.  The voice-work is pretty good, nothing truly amazing but nothing truly amazingly bad.  I won't play another Gungrave game but I might give the anime a chance one of these days.

As much as I want to blast it all the way to hell for it's near-horrid gameplay, I really can't.  It would be totally unfair to the cutscenes and the amount of care they made to the graphics.  Granted, it may be weak justifications for an average rating but giving it a 3 or 4 doesn't feel right.  If you like this sort of run-and-gun gaming, give it a chance.  You'll probably like it a lot more than I did.

5/10