And that’s the pair of them. I’d never played this sequel before, but it turned out to be just as good as the first game. There have been a few quality of life tweaks, such as not needing to choose which challenges to do before you do them – now they act more like normal achievements – and some of the upgrades upgrade themselves as you use them, rather than need improved versions synthesising.
The gameplay is the same as before, although it felt a lot easier. Perhaps that’s partly down to me using “prevasion” (a shield-like technique) properly for the duration this time, instead of just at the end like I did before. Graphically, it’s a little better too, with big improvements on the interstitial screens which look like they had higher resolution art to work from rather than just upscale the 3DS original images.
The big change though, is that there’s a whole second story to play through with a different character with his own set of skills. Copen, one of the characters from Gunvolt 1 (and called Akira by the Japanese voice actors!) is out to take down the bad guys and Gunvolt (who although good, is an “adept” like the baddies, and Copen/Akira wants to kill them all), as well as rescue his sister. He has a laser not a gun, which can constantly fire, and instead of tagging baddies with his shots like Gunvolt does, he has to tag them by dashing into them. He also collects special weapons from each boss, each of which is especially good against one other boss – so actually, Copen plays a lot more like Mega Man.
Copen’s levels aren’t all the same as Gunvolt’s either. It reminded me of playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles as Knuckles, because you cross paths with Gunvolt (rather than Sonic), have mostly the same bosses but have to defeat them in a different way, have some totally different levels, and have some levels that are the same but you take a different route through.
Anyway, I’ve completed the game as Gunvolt, but can’t get the “true ending” until I’ve beaten it with Copen, it seems, and I’ve not got very far in with him yet.
