Long Card Road Home: Sweezy Gunner

Man, there's this thing. This thing, ok, where you start up a game and the opening FMV or intro cutscene or whatever you want to call it is just not the good. And your brain braces itself for suck and then ... Oh, wait no, this is actually not that bad. Hey, this is kinda cute and fun.

Sweezy Gunner is that thing.

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The game starts off with a dreadful little cutscene that explains nothing and is weirdly jarring. The eponymous sweezy gunner itself, which is a sort of rolling tank thing with a face, is cute like thomas the tank engine. A sort of pleasant in the afternoon friendly rolling death machine. The pilot on the other hand is sort of a weird surly girl with a draconic stomach tattoo all out to say hi to the world talking to ... It doesn't matter. It is ideal we just forget it as quickly as possible.

I'm pretty sure I got Sweezy out of an indiegala bundle, and man oh man are indiegala bundles just a hot bed of card and card awful games. So expectations are cardly surprising at how low they are and the cutscene is a further lowering of expectations. But then the oddest thing happens.

Yeah. It is kinda cute and fun.


Sweezy gunner reminds me of playing late 80s to early 90s console games, albeit with smoother looking graphics. Although this game is somewhat retro, the graphics are not heavily pixelated and although sometimes looking a little too photoshop blur tool the game is quite smooth on the eyes. I'm not going to say the artist is talented but rather is extremely competent and created a game that is really easy to look at, and follow. Everything is cute and colorful, and the music is rather upbeat instead of moody. At its core the game is essentially a twin stick shooter, although the controls are surprisingly forgiving. Sweezy goes where you tell him via the keyboard, and the gun fires 360 degrees wherever the mouse is pointing. I usually have a period of acclimation to any top down shooters, or anything relating to it, as it takes time to get accustomed to the controls. You won't have this problem with Sweezy, since the controls are very simple and just do what you tell them to. The game is very responsive, which makes sense given how much it wants to be a shmup.

The game world is weird ... As I said, it is colorful, a bright looking paradise floating in a starry void. In the distance other stony islands float through the air, reminding me of Toejam and Earl or probably some other games from my childhood I can't quite bring to my mouth. The enemies in the early game are all pretty happy looking, just casually firing nine million bullets to canvas the screen at all times. Enemies do visually differ, but on the most part the difference lies in their behavior and how they shoot at you.

Gameplay is basically just shooting, but there is sort of an interesting mechanism in place. Your bullets do not go past the edges of the screen, but enemies do remain where you last saw them, so you end up trying to line up your shots to targets you can't see, scrolling to expose them and then backing off before the hail of bright red bullets pounce on you. On the other hand the game's other mechanic - gathering gold to buy upgrades - is really hurt by this. Gold, for whatever stupid reason, disappears extremely rapidly, so you end up not really getting any reward in the more intense fights. I'm kinda ambivalent towards game mechanics that punish you for winning more difficult battles. I mean, that just sounds wrong doesn't it? It's especially jarring after playing Risk of Rain, where gold can be picked up immediately but eventually just floats over to you.

The upgrade system in Sweezy is pretty good. There is a store and there is a mechanic (the system, not the guy) where you collect research on enemies. Once you've finished the research (which does have other useful tidbits about how they behave and work) you can purchase an upgrade based on the research. The store also unlocks over time as you collect bigger coins, which sort of gates the upgrade system a little. I like the system, but the fact that gold is a pain in the ass to collect drags it down a bit. The game doesn't really seem balanced around what a hassle picking up gold is, almost as though the devs imagined you'd just loot and scoot in a constant hectic haze instead of playing frugally. That works fine very early on, but it ends up pretty taxing into the mid-game, once enemies actually fight back.

Oh, the store also has what amounts to boar pants quests from mmorpgs. Kill a bunch of enemies to receive some reward. You have to pick up their bits, but otherwise is pretty quick and simple. Nothing to complain about, although honestly not really much of an increase in system depth, either. I did have trouble getting the quests to line up with where I actually was, but gold isn't that necessary anyway.

You also get a couple additional abilities over the course of the game, but only one of them has tactical application, which is the 'flash shield', a second health bar you can use on the fly that recharges over time. The others just allow you to go places that are otherwise blocked off, which honestly was mostly annoying.

So I played Sweezy for a couple hours, and while I won't go so far as to say I like the game I am pretty sure I had fun with it. It's tongue in cheek, very silly and most of the music tracks I experienced were pretty good. Some of them great, others a bit worse. The problems with the game lie mostly in, as I said, the whole rush to pick up gold thing is just annoying and the game's pace rather slows down later on as there's just too many enemies to barrel through. There are also visibility issues in some of the later game levels, and honestly just too much crap on screen that doesn't have to do with what you're doing. I also found the power up system a little frustrating in parts - many of them don't last long at all, some work on bosses when I don't think any are supposed to and many of them are actually either sidegrades or cause further visibility issues. A couple of the power ups are just entirely annoying instead of useful. It would be nice if you could hold power ups and deploy them at the start of non-boss fights, because as is most of them end up dropping after you're finishing a screen off and then don't do much.

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Still, all in all, the game was worth a good four hours of play. I didn't finish it, but  It could use a little work in a couple areas, but on the most part, it did what it set out to do and did it in a good easy on the eyes chill game to play sort of way. It is currently on sale in a bundle for $3 over at groupees so if you feel like playing a cheap, simple shmup then hey, there you go

edit: Apparently this post, after being published, reset to draft. Not certain how I managed to do that like, at all, but there you go?