Uragun is a relentless twin-stick shooter that isn’t satisfied with the base challenge of the genre. It ups the ante with the introduction of roguelike mechanics, taking your resourceful mech through the same maps, as you unlock upgrades and weapons that give you the extra boost you need. It’s the kind of game that screams “just one more run” and while it flirts with repetition, there is enough quality in here to make this chaotic warfare worth pursuing.

Mech My Day

Despite all the evidence pointing to it, Uragun is not a Housemarque release. The Finnish studio is renowned for its output of high-quality twin-stick shooters, but developer Kool2Play proved that it knows the genre as well, delivering a frantic and challenging game about a mech looking for its other half, the human pilot, in a world filled with corrupted and deadly AI. Your search will take you across a few devastated cities, and your firepower is only going to ramp up the chaos and destruction.

The gameplay loop is a simple but effective one, as you start each run striving to get slightly better by the time you succumb to the opposing forces. Most of your achievements are lost forever when the mech is rebuilt in the Orbita Station, so don’t get too attached to the extremely useful weapon mods. However, your efforts aren’t going to waste as you appreciate the brand-new weapons and count your intel pieces. The latter is of utmost importance, as they can be exchanged for modules in the research console, endowing your mech with everlasting upgrades such as additional health, boost cooldown, or brief damage immunity.

Acquiring these upgrades isn’t the end of it, though; your mech comes with limited memory slots and you must purchase memory expansions to fit all those great modules. Most of the time you will struggle with different builds, trying to make sense of the combinations and what is best for each run.

A city run isn’t entirely linear, as you’re often faced with a couple of choices. The layout of the levels is random, but the big twist here is that the level rewards are in plain sight, waiting for you to make a choice. Will you go for the challenge that may earn you a new weapon and intel pieces, or the other one offering a weapon mod and a plugin that gives you some additional buffs?

The level layout itself isn’t randomized, a design choice that is often part of roguelike games, but the level rewards and enemies are. This prevents a stale challenge and keeps you guessing for the entire duration of the run, as enemy types, amount, and spawn timing vary each time. Obviously, there are mid- and end-level bosses that will quickly become familiar faces.

Guns Blazing

Your mech can be assigned with one weapon for each arm, and it’s possible to utilize the same weapon type in both slots. However, a diverse combination often yields the best results, such as a minigun and a railgun, catering both for fire rate and range. But it’s by using mods that their potential is fully explored, paving the way for extra destructive power in ingenious new approaches. Unfortunately, there is no weapon customization, meaning that you are limited to what these bring you, with the occasional extra perk coming with a new possession.

Adding similar mods increases the efficiency of each, and it’s this constant growth and the anxiety of losing the run due to a few unwarranted mistakes that gives Uragun this addictive effect. You want to go for one more try, fully confident on your newly acquired upgrade and hoping that this time you get to experience the next city. The bosses are suitably challenging, lesser threats when you are better equipped and knowledgeable of their tactics, but a slight mistake may be enough to make your performance crash and burn.

Controls are straightforward and easy to grasp, with both gamepad and mouse and keyboard combo working perfectly. The former is likely the choice of hardcore genre fans, but using your mouse to aim with complete precision is something that you shouldn’t instantly reject.

This is a game of nerves, and rightly so, where blinking isn’t recommended during the moments when hordes are coming from all sides, spawning at random, and not hesitating to rush you. Due to all the flashy visual effects, sometimes it’s hard to spot a lost projectile when moving so frantically, and since health carries across the levels, it can be frustrating. But that’s part of the genre, and so is a certain feeling of repetitiveness to go with the appeal.

Uragun is solid, frantic fun, and worth the time of appreciators of some good old arcade shooting action. The mechanics are sound yet somewhat simple, and this feeling of sameness may rear its ugly head after a while. There’s no multiplayer mode in sight, something that could give the game an extra layer of enjoyment and tactics, but sadly for now it is limited to the solo campaign. There is room for this game to grow, but as it currently stands, you could do a lot worse than controlling this mech on a pilot rescue mission through the confines of bullet hell world.

Rating: 7/10

Pros:

• Challenging and fun
• Mech customization is simple but enjoyable
• Enemy and rewards randomization keep the trials fresh

Cons:

• Needs occasional breaks to avoid tedium
• Strictly single-player

Uragun review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.