Welcome back to Save State, where we play indie games and chew bubblegum, and we’re all out of gum. Over the past few weeks, I recently rediscovered the title Gunfire Reborn. I initially saw the roguelite in Early Access on Steam when it didn’t have English language support, and I was overjoyed to see when the developers got it localized in English. It’s been a while since I’ve played a rooty-tooty looty shooty, and Gunfire Reborn definitely filled that void for the last couple of weeks.
Gunfire Reborn is a fun combination of Borderlands and Risk of Rain 2, where each character is an adorable furry critter with differing special powers. Each specific character of Gunfire Reborn has a primary and secondary skill- very similar to the action skills and grenades from Borderlands, and you progress through varying environments taking on enemies in each room which is somewhat similar to Risk of Rain 2. Some characters may have an actual grenade that they toss for their secondary, whether it just explodes or forms an icy vortex that pulls foes into one another, but others might fire off an inky document that you can move through for bonuses. It just depends on the character.
Gunfire Reborn is a pretty simple concept: You pick a hero, run into a series of 4 dungeons, and then fight a boss at the end of each. While running through the dungeons, you’ll encounter all sorts of different enemies and traps while you explore and look for any treasure chests, shopkeepers, and other advantages you can take to give you an edge to clear the run. To help you clear the dungeons, you’ll find treasure chests with goblets that will give you powerful ascensions, occult scrolls that can completely change your approach to combat, and a wide variety of weapons you can choose from to suit your current character and build.
A title like Gunfire Reborn lives and dies by its characters, and every hero being cute and having vastly different abilities really helps in terms of staying power. The first hero you play as for the tutorial is the Crown Prince, whose primary skill fires an orb of energy that can freeze enemies, which synergizes well with the rest of his kit that focuses on elemental weapons. It’s a perfect character for starting out and experimenting with the game’s mechanics, as you can synergize with different elements, fire an orb to stop enemies from moving, and chuck a grenade when you need a quick burst of damage.
However, there are many characters that get significantly crazier than that. Lyn, an adorable snow ram, prioritizes getting critical hits, which reduces the cooldown of her primary skill that can instantly kill enemies below a specific health threshold and create shockwaves that damage surrounding foes. After clearing an area of foes, you’ll often be presented with a treasure chest that will give you a list of bonuses you can choose from, and this is where the roguelite nature of Gunfire Reborn comes into play.
As you run through the interconnected hallways and paths, trying to reach the end of each zone to fight a boss, you’ll find a wide variety of different guns with specific properties, you’ll find occult scrolls that have passive benefits (and sometimes negatives) for your character, and you’ll also be able to find ascensions that can improve your gunplay, primary, or secondary skills. Finding the right combination of these can lead to fun combinations where, for example with Lyn, your Frost Burial primary skill gets reduced cooldown as you shoot critical hit spots on enemies, but your Frost Burial can now shatter crit spots by itself and reduce its own cooldown, allowing you to make icy explosions almost as quickly as you can press the button.
The weapon variety is pretty interesting in Gunfire Reborn, too. While you don’t have as many guns as a Borderlands game, you do have a great variety of different firearms. While you have the basic pistol, rifle, sniper, shotgun, and rocket launcher setup you’d see in many other titles, your sniper rifle might be an actual sniper rifle, or it could be a bow, or it could be a brick. In one run, you may get a set of icicles that you can send flying and will attack whatever enemies you’re looking at, and in another run you may get an SMG that can dump its entire magazine in around a second, or at least it would, if you didn’t have a group of occult scrolls that form a Spiritual Link which lets you continue firing from an empty magazine indefinitely.
On top of the items you can find during a run, you also have a talent board from which you can buy skills that will help you clear your next run. This talent board is primarily why I’ve called Gunfire Reborn a roguelite rather than a roguelike, as this talent board gives consistent, steady progression throughout the game like increasing damage by specific weapon types or allowing you to reroll for items at shops or for inscriptions on weapons at the craftsman.
So, effectively, you gain essence from getting far into, or successfully completing runs of the title and can then spend that essence on talents or new characters in its main hub. There are a lot of characters, many of whom play differently from one another and synergize with completely different weapons and scrolls. One character may prioritize melee weapons from the start, while another may be better off with a little fairy that automatically shoots for the player while they spend their time turned into an ink creature that can’t die. There are all sorts of wacky combinations.
The weapons you find while in the middle of an adventure can have inscriptions that, quite often, will dramatically increase the effectiveness of the gun. There are also powerful Gemini inscriptions that only work if both guns you’re carrying have them, which can be easier met after some talent board progression, but these inscriptions are oftentimes incredibly powerful.
After clearing a few adventures, you’ll unlock the Reincarnation mode that lets you toggle on some mechanics that can make the title easier or more challenging. The Spiritual Links mentioned above are actually from the Bizarre Dream option, where if you collect 3 or more scrolls that fit a specific ability and are using the right weapon or character, you get an additional passive bonus for meeting all of the criteria. Some of these options, like Mysterious Jokul, makes the game significantly harder in the fourth stages.
The best part about roguelites is breaking the game in half, and Gunfire Reborn offers an absolute ton on this front, as there are a lot of different combinations players can pull together that will often be different from a previous build. Of course, if you’re doing many runs of this title, that means you’ll wind up encountering a lot of the same level pieces quite often, though that doesn’t mean the composition of enemies or hazards will be the same, so there’s still reason to be cautious.
The translations of Gunfire Reborn could use a little help, but thankfully for most characters the information is simple enough that you can understand what you need to build towards by just reading the descriptions, though there’s a couple of characters and several occult scrolls that are difficult to understand what their abilities and effects actually do. Thankfully, there’s a wiki that has more accurate descriptions for most everything in Gunfire Reborn just a week or two after a new content release, which really aided my understanding of what the artsy squirrel Momo does with any of his skills.
That said, the true value of a multiplayer roguelite lies in its multiplayer, and thankfully Gunfire Reborn doesn’t come up short on this front, either. Up to four players can connect to one another and take on hordes of enemies as well as bosses and can even try to optimize scrolls and weapon choices based on which heroes everyone settles on using. You can revive each other in multiplayer, too, which can be useful if you goof and stand next to an explosive barrel or directly on top of a fire-breathing trap.
With that out of the way, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember, everyone, that you can learn a lot about a man by the way he strangles you. Until next time!