This game is awful. What starts as a lighthearted parody of Mirror’s Edge quickly devolves into a frustrating mess the moment you acquire the grappling hook — an item that highlights just how broken the game’s physics and mechanics truly are.
The premise is bizarre enough to catch your attention: you play as a nameless character sprinting through a colorless city, armed with guns that fire fish bullets. Yes, fish bullets. For reasons the game never explains, these fish are apparently superpowered, capable of taking down brutes and assassins with a single headshot. It’s silly, sure, but there’s some novelty in the absurdity.
The gameplay loop seems simple but promising at first. You run along walls, kill enemies, acquire increasingly ridiculous fish-based weapons, and keep running. There’s a fish rocket launcher, homing fish missiles, a fully automatic fish cannon, and even a fish shotgun that’s surprisingly fun to use. By the end of the first mission, you’ll think you’ve got a handle on what to expect from the rest of the game.
Then the grappling hook happens.
Halfway through the game, you’re given the grappling hook, and that’s when Guns and Fishes completely falls apart. The hook’s physics are, frankly, an unforgivable disaster. Grappling to a surface should allow you to swing between points with some level of control — but here, the hook inexplicably launches you upward in erratic, unpredictable ways. There’s no consistency to the way it handles momentum, and the cooldown on the hook is poorly communicated, leaving you floundering midair more often than not.
Up until this point, the game isn’t half bad. It’s absurd, sure, but it’s fun in a chaotic, arcade-like way. The fish-based arsenal is ridiculous, and the movement mechanics — while not groundbreaking — get the job done. But the grappling hook takes that shred of enjoyable chaos and turns it into a tedious, rage-inducing chore.
What’s worse is that the game leans heavily on this mechanic in its second half, forcing you to rely on a broken tool to traverse increasingly complex levels. Instead of feeling like a nimble parkour expert, you’ll feel like a frustrated player wrestling with mechanics that simply don’t work.
In the end, Guns and Fishes is a game that drowns in its own ambition. What starts as a quirky, tongue-in-cheek experience spirals into a maddening exercise in poor design. There’s potential buried in its silliness, but the game’s second half sinks it like a stone — or maybe like a fish that just can’t swim.
