Gunboat God Review
A relentless twin-stick shooter that lives and dies on feel, and absolutely nails it, with visuals that look as good as it plays.
Gunboat God. Credit: Janson RAD / Fireshine Games
I had been eagerly anticipating Gunboat God from Janson RAD and Fireshine Games since it was first announced years ago. This is one of those rare times when a game lives up to the hype I’d built in my own head. I love this game to bits. Gunboat God is a gorgeously stylish, perfectly executed twin-stick shooter.
You’re told that “weakness must be discarded,” and are promptly banished from the Ascended Citadel, the last fragment of civilization, with a few other humans. You fall to the flooded world far below, but are lucky enough to land in some kind of boat. The gunboat. Its owner, Yeti the Crocodile, resists eating you to make a deal: help him test and upgrade his invention, and you can use it to take your revenge on the Citadel.
Instead of top-down, the game is sidescrolling, with up and down triggering jumping and diving. Your gunboat zips over the water, and moves even faster if you dash. The right stick aims, as expected, and threats come hard and fast from above and below the ocean surface. You unlock eight different guns, each with a unique special and upgrade path. On top of that, there are more than ten abilities, augments, and powers, including a rocket that lets you fly or dive with tighter control. Speed, fire rate, abilities, and special shots are fueled by killing enemies, and the game is at its best when you’re really hammering the many things out to demolish you.
Gunboat God. Credit: Janson RAD / Fireshine Games
Shooting and movement both feel incredible. Firing a gun has just the right amount of pushback, paired with screen shake and impact effects that make every shot satisfying to fire and land. Movement across and beneath the ocean’s roiling surface is smooth, but tactile when it needs to be. The water isn’t just aesthetic; it actively shapes how everything moves. Every visual effect and physical reaction feels dialed in. It’s all backed by chunky, satisfying sound design. Even the stylized, pixelated UI feels great to use. Few games understand juice this well, and it’s what pushes this one over the top for me.
The action spans five biomes and more than 200 levels. Each of the worlds throws new enemies, hazards, and a boss at you. Levels are short but often demanding, and over 20 mission types keep things from going stale by constantly shifting your goals. Some might say it gets repetitive, but I never cared. It just feels too good to play.
Some levels include bonus goals, like finishing without jumping or maintaining a certain accuracy. These reward uranium rods, which you can spend on skill upgrades. You’re constantly feeding rewards back into your build, and crucially, you’re always progressing. Simply clearing a level grants sparks for boosting overall weapon power and motes for each gun’s individual upgrade tree, so you’re never stuck grinding for basic upgrades.
Gunboat God. Credit: Janson RAD / Fireshine Games
The game isn’t easy, and it gets even harder in the special Dread Mode. Throughout the campaign, you’ll find augments that only work there, offering effects like piercing shots or damage over time. Plutonium nuggets, used to upgrade augments, are also exclusive to that mode. There’s yet another currency for upgrading abilities. It’s a lot to track, and occasionally confusing, but it never gets in the way of the fun.
The visuals are what first grabbed me, even from the game’s first trailers. The water and foreground elements are rendered in black, broken only by your red bullets, so your boat and anything on the surface read as solid silhouettes. Underwater, everything flips to white, giving you a clean contrast as you move between layers. Each biome adds a colorful but restrained backdrop, keeping things varied without clutter. Yeti and the enemies are full of personality, with sharp silhouettes and energetic animation that stay readable even in the chaos. I love Yeti in particular—one of my favorite game characters in recent memory. Everything is always moving, even hazards, thanks to the water, with black particle effects constantly flying across the screen. It’s chaotic, but never overwhelming. Just beautiful in motion.
Gunboat God is one of those rare, perfect games. It knows what it is, what it wants to be, and executes, a towering achievement in its genre. I’m still chasing better mission star ratings because it just feels that good to play. I rarely stick with a game after finishing it, and this is one of the very few that’s staying in my regular rotation.
Gunboat God
Gunboat God is a twin-stick shooter where incredible feel carries every moment, backed by striking, high-contrast visuals.
