One of the newest releases from Hamster in the Arcade Archives series is not only an old shmup, but it’s also a great one. Gunnail was originally released by NMK in 1993 but has found new life on the Switch! Gunnail initially looks like your standard vertical shmup but upon actually playing, you’ll quickly find that there’s nothing standard about this blazing fast game. In fact, Gunnail is so fast that for the uninitiated, you’ll likely blow through credits so fast you’ll think the difficulty is rigged! Once you get a grasp on the overall mechanics of the game, things settle down, but this is not a casual shmup by any means!
In Gunnail, you start out with a weak main shot and must obtain one of three types of powerups to have a chance of survival. Blue powerups give you a forward laser that’s moderately well-spaced and spreads as you power it up, red ones give you a wide spread weapon with lower power, and purple powerups provide a much more powerful forward beam weapon. Enemies come in hot and fast, leaving you struggling to keep up with their patterns and survive the onslaught. Bullets are blazing fast and if your positioning is poor, chances are good you won’t survive long.
As you might guess, Gunnail belongs to that class of shmups that requires significant memorization to maximize your score and some fairly substantial twitch reflexes to match. This is not a shmup for amateurs. There are some weird nuances to Gunnail that make things more challenging too. For one, color change powerups don’t disappear, so if you have the weapon you want and a new powerup shows up, you’re constantly dodging it in order to preserve your preferred form of firepower. There are also collectibles left behind by enemies which boost your score, but they’re quite deceptive as the main method of scoring is to instead drain your shields to the point of death to create score multipliers!
Multipliers are a common theme among shmups but Gunnail does things a fair bit differently. You start out with three shield icons instead of lives. Take a hit and you lose a shield. Take three hits and your shield alarm goes off…one more and you’re toast. But weirdly, that’s what you want because having no shields left significantly boosts your score multipliers and the strength of the powerups you obtain. Unfortunately this approach requires significant skill and a heck of a lot of practice on the various levels of Gunnail! Oh and there’s an utterly horrible alarm that goes off when you get down to your last shield. Thankfully, Hamster has included an option to turn off the alarm in-game, sparing your ears the constant siren as you take hit after hit learning how to play.
Speaking of various levels, there are some other ways in which NMK made a unique title here. One of those ways is the inclusion of speed levels in Level 3 and Level 6. In between normal combat, you’ll arrive at levels where you must collect speed icons to boost your ship through the level. If you do well enough on them, you boost rapidly through generating multipliers and bonus items which flood the screen, spamming your points and giving you any powerups you could possibly desire.
The visuals in Gunnail are noticeably reminiscent of Toaplan sprite design, but there is no information on whether that’s the case or instead that the sprites simply follow that design method. Regardless, this is a great looking game with complex, ornate bosses and interesting enemies. The port to the Switch has only made things crisper and the visuals hold up well for being almost 30 years old.
The sound on the other hand has not fared so well in Gunnail. The soundtrack is dated and repetitive and shmup fans will be less than impressed with the weak chiptunes here. The sound effects are fairly aggressive and make up for the weak music, but it’s still a shame to have a weak, fast-paced generic soundtrack that’s constantly covered by blaring sirens and pounding blasts from your ship.
There are leaderboards in Gunnail now, and the game features several manual options as well as controller mapping and programmable autofire, making gameplay at least approachable for casuals and newbies to shmups. But even at the low price point, expect to be challenged here as this is not a game for the faint of heart or faint of reflexes!
With a Caravan Mode, High Score mode, Japanese language mode and more, Gunnail is definitely worth a few of your hard earned bucks, but not everyone will enjoy the challenge or the rapidly changing dynamic weapons systems. At under $10, you can’t really go wrong here and Gunnail is an excellent choice to add to your vertical game library. Just go grab it. You’ll have a great time, as long as you don’t throw your controller through the TV!
This review was based on a digital copy of Gunnail provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was excellent in both. Gunnail is also available on the PS4.