Gunbound - This is FREE??
 Which
ever game Gunbound reminds you of the most is going to reveal
your age. We won't go into specifics, but it'll be either
Worms, or Scorched Earth. Either way, you know the concept.
You have a honking great gun with limited mobility, and
the idea is to blow your opponent to pieces before they
do the same to you. Gunbound takes this concept online,
into the world of the MMO game, allowing you to annihilate
complete strangers and, best of all, for free.
While the basic game concept is pretty old, the window-dressing
on Gunbound is pretty great. It's a Korean game, and the
graphics very much have that Asian-cutesy-anime feel about
them, but they're very well done. Avatars are 2D, but the
backgrounds are 3D. All the units (mobiles) have their own
little animations. The sound effects add to the satisfaction
of scoring a palpable hit, but most users are going to turn
that in-game music off pretty damn fast.
Gunbound runs special 'n00b' servers, so if you don't want
to deal with over-equipped gankers while you're just learning
the game, you don't have to. And that's going to come in
handy, because the in-game English is pretty bad, and that
includes the instructions and most of the dedicated website.
Fortunately, the controls are pretty simple: arrow keys
move you left and right and move your angle of fire up and
down. Hold the space bar down to power up your shot, let
it go to fire. All pretty intuitive. While all the 'mobiles'
have their own special little quirks, in general, the longer
you delay your shot, the more powerful it's going to be,
but the more pot-shots are going to get taken at you first.
 Winning
battles in the game earns you gold, which you can spend
buying your avatar clothes. In case that all sounds a bit
Neopets, the clothes actually improve your performance in
the game. You can get items, too, which allow you to do
things like teleport, heal, or change the wind direction
- wind and gravity change from game to game, and you have
to learn to adjust. You also go up levels using Game Points,
which restricts you to certain servers, and also allows
you to do things like form and join guilds. The guilds have
no real function, it just allows you to race your 'team'
against other people's.
There are four types of gameplay, though the first three
are pretty much identical: Solo (which unlike what it sounds
is a team deathmatch), Tag, which allows you to swap mobiles
during the battle, and Score, which is a team deathmatch,
first team to more kills than team-members. The other mode
is jewel, which oddly lets you destroy pretty little falling
targets. All the first three are played as teams, and your
teams are pretty much random, you just head into the first
'room' with a vacancy. Which means we need to talk about
the Gunbound community.
 It's
not so great. Every online game has problems with some of
the users, of course, and you're always going to run across
idiots and really nice people. Gunbound has had enormous
problems with hackers and cheat codes, which means that
sometimes the game is going to be just no fun. And while
the servers are monitored, there does seem to be a high
level of abuse. And whining about the abuse. But you take
what you get, and this isn't really a problem with the game
itself.
The game itself is one of those ones that's hideously addictive
for no readily apparent reason. The gameplay is fairly repetitive,
and yet compelling. It's more like Worms than Scorched Earth
in tone, and there's a certain something in the combination
of whimsy and violent destruction.
Overall Rating: 8.8/10
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