I played Gunnhildr on stream with one of the developers in the audience. We had a great time chatting about the game, and laughing at my lack of skill at it. Gunnhildr is a roguelike first person shooter with procedurally generated levels, enemy layouts, gun drops, and weapon/player upgrades, all dressed up in a unique sort of techy Norse mythology skin. It's somewhat like a cross between Doom and Binding of Isaac, and takes inspiration from a lot of well known entries in the genre. I can't speak for how much content is currently available in the game, as I wasn't able to make it past the first miniboss, but even in its current state of Early Access, there is a large variety of player and weapon upgrades that affect the game in fairly major ways, a small arsenal of weapons to choose from, and enough unlockable upgrades to last a player for quite a while. The developers are always working on fixing bugs and adding new features, and post regular updates on their public discord group, which they also use as their main development channel. If you're interested in seeing the development process of the game, that's the place to be!
Personally, I found Gunnhildr to be rather difficult. My skills at aiming with the mouse in most first person shooters in general are not great, but combined with the lightning fast movement speed, emphasis on constant use of movement abilities, and the pinpoint accurate weapons currently present in the game, it was very hard to be effective at everything at the same time. I would do alright against a couple of enemies at a time, but any time I entered a large room that contained more enemies, I was only able to avoid taking damage when I had some of the more overpowered upgrades that allowed me to clear the entire room quickly. A single shot from an enemy seems to deal about 50 damage to your shield, with melee attacks dealing slightly less.
After your shields are depleted, any amount of damage will kill you, but it doesn't appear that damage that removes your shield carries over to your health, making the game feel a little bit like Sonic, in the sense that as long as you have any number of rings, you'll have a second chance to get back into the game. That being said, the only way to regain your shield is to clear the room and use your currency to recharge it, or to do a special finisher move on a stunned enemy. Enemies only become stunned when you hit them in their weakpoint, which is a small white power core on their chest (in the case of the large berserker enemies, it's on their back, and the small melee enemies don't seem to have a weak point). Much of the time, enemies hold their weapons and arms in front of their chest to take aim at you, so getting a shot on the weak point is no easy task to begin with. Once it's done, you have to enter the special finisher move by hitting the melee button while looking directly at the enemy. If you're not looking at the right spot, you'll do a normal melee attack instead, which usually ragdolls the enemy and removes them from their stunned state, wasting your chance to get your health back. You're also able to accidentally kill them, dash into them, or have them die to an environmental effect before you get your special move off. After all that, if you're lucky enough to successfully get the finisher to work, it rewards you with a measly 10 shield energy, meaning you'd have to perform the move five times before having enough shield to block a single shot!
Do take my notes above with a grain of salt. As I said at the start, my skills in first person shooters in general are not great. I'm sure more experienced players would have a much easier time dealing with the situations presented in this game, but I think it's worth taking a look at the game from a casual side as well. I think much of the frustration I had could be mitigated by a few changes to the finisher move, such as moving the weakpoint to a location less obstructed by the enemy's geometry (such as their head, a fairly typical "weakpoint" location in most shooters), making it more difficult to knock enemies out of their stunned state, and increasing the detection area for finisher button presses around the stunned enemies.
In the end, I had a good time playing Gunnhildr, and I'm sure other players interested in FPS roguelikes would have fun with it as well. I found a few technical hiccups during my playtime, such as an enemy spawning on top of the level geometry, but overall the game ran quite well. I'm sure things will only improve as the game continues its development!
