The surprise release of Exit the Gungeon for Nintendo Switch was pretty exciting. No one had been expecting Devolver Digital’s Apple Arcade title to drop immediately upon announcement for the Switch and with the success of Enter The Gungeon, the sequel was inevitably just as exciting. However, for those you that aren’t aware, Exit The Gungeon is not a sequel but instead more of a side story to the original game, continuing the rather thin plot as you escape from the Gungeon you helped to destroy.
Exit The Gungeon has actually been out for Apple Arcade since last September, but it was exclusive to iOS. As a game designed primarily for smartphones, it’s easy to see the origins of Exit’s level design and gameplay mechanics in every nook and cranny of the game. The Switch release is bringing Exit to a much wider audience however, and most people will be experiencing this rather different take on Enter The Gungeon for the first time.
In Exit The Gungeon, you play the same Gungeoneers as before, including the pilot, the marine, and all your other favorites. But instead of winding your way through endless randomized levels and slowly upgrading your equipment, deciding what to hang on to, you’re ‘blessed’ by the goddess of guns with an ever-changing rotating assortment of guns that shifts mid-play every minute or so. Take that rotating menagerie of firepower, dump the exploration element, and replace it with a 2D vertical action run-n-gun style of gameplay and you’ve pretty much got Exit The Gungeon.
If changing weapons constantly mid-play sounds bizarre, well, it is. Not ones to be shy from being weird, Devolver has included a wide variety of strange and unique guns yet again, including ones that put top hats on all enemies, wind-up guns, giant projectile guns, ones that fire mailboxes, and so many more it’s pointless to list them all. You are travelling up an elevator, fighting off enemies as the Gungeon collapses, and killing everything that moves every time you stop. Avoid taking hits and the polyhedron die in the corner levels up slowly, raising your chances of getting more and more powerful weapons more often. You’ll need them, because a good half of your armaments are nearly useless and the second your gun counter gets reset, you’re back to the weaker ones.
This is of course, a vicious system. It’s designed to be. Exit The Gungeon is tough as all hell and incredibly frustrating. Not only could you get a gun that leaves you vulnerable and underpowered while being swarmed with enemies, but some can’t even be aimed properly. Enemies fire swarms of bullets and shmup-like bullet patterns as you climb the levels of the Gungeon, making it harder and harder to avoid hits. Luckily, there’s one more key element, the dodge-roll. Dodge-rolling is pretty much the main mechanic of this maniacal twin-stick shooter. Simply hit the dodge button and you roll through bullets. This is the only way to avoid many enemy attacks, especially ones with denser patterns. You can also jump through the patterns, but either way you’ll have to literally hurl yourself towards oncoming enemy fire if you stand a chance at surviving. Between the dodge-roll and the jump-roll, you’re nearly invincible most of the time and many players have found that by spamming these defensive movements, it’s almost easy to avoid taking hits and much easier to play the game.
It should be noted that the Apple Arcade version of Exit The Gungeon actually featured a slightly different mechanic in terms of dodge-jumping, where you could direct your landing point via touch and it was delineated by a line so you could make precise jumps through a hail of gunfire to the exact landing spot required to survive. That mechanic is suspiciously absent in the Switch version of the game, and jumping is a lot riskier than rolling in most cases. Speaking of the Switch, it’s also noticeably easier to play Exit The Gungeon in docked mode than undocked mode. It’s entirely playable in both, but it’s just easier to see what’s going on on a big screen, making progress faster.
In addition to the wide assortment of firepower, there are some stores where you can buy extra items, extra life back, and extra blanks. Blanks clear the screen of bullets, but you can only hold a few at a time. Backed into a corner with no way to dodge and land safely? Boss got you pinned down with a nasty pattern? Use a blank. Don’t hesitate, that’s what they’re for. Beat a boss, access a store, and spend all those bullet casings you’ve been saving for a rainy day. You can’t take it with you, after all.
There are a few questionable design choices in Exit The Gungeon. The primary one is the control scheme. Controls can only be switched from the L and R buttons to the ZL and ZR buttons on the Switch. The majority of controls aren’t mappable and this is incredibly frustrating depending on your hand size. In the Apple Arcade version, you fired constantly all the time, but here, you’re forced to hold down the fire button with one finger while using the firing stick to aim with your right thumb. Left stick controls movement and ZL and L control jumping and dodging. The tension required to hold down the fire button while manipulating the right stick and figuring out which L button to hit at a given time is more than a bit of a hassle. There should definitely have been an option for constant fire with no buttons held, as there’s no lack of ammunition. Additionally, jumping with the L buttons is a hassle when you’re trying to control your character with the left stick and would be much nicer on the right with blanks shifted to the left for stability. None of this is possible however, thanks to the complete lack of a mappable button menu.
Exit The Gungeon is fun, frantic, and irreverent. The bosses are weird and wild, the guns are fun, and the enemies are wildly varied. But it’s not anywhere near as fun as Enter The Gungeon and it’s definitely not the full sequel some were hoping for. The complex and counter-intuitive run-n-gun mechanics that progress at blistering speed will not appeal to every Gungeon fan and are significantly more challenging than perhaps they could have been. This is a game meant for people that want to be challenged, not casual players and it shows almost immediately.
For the $10 you’ll spend on it, you’ll probably get your money’s worth out of Exit The Gungeon. It’s a solid game that’s well-designed and not glitchy at all. The lack of some customization and the changes made to shift from smartphones however leave something to be desired, as Exit feels almost incomplete, like a bite-sized piece of something bigger. It has all the trademark humor of the Gungeon series, but it’s wrapped in a skill-restrictive package that will turn off as many people as it excites. While it is obvious the intent here was to design a challenging game, it’s almost a barrier to many players and not everyone will have a great time. Eventually, you’ll get better at Exit The Gungeon, but it will take more work than some players will be willing to put in. Those of you with excellent reflexes however, will delight in the short but vicious challenge that Exit The Gungeon presents!
This review was based on a digital copy of Exit The Gungeon provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. Exit The Gungeon is also available on Apple Arcade and Steam.