This is a difficulty review, and another clear candidate for a "Neutral" rating option.
On one hand, GunSouls is an interesting take on the genre, and the gunplay and in combat movement feels solid and is fun. The weapons are all shockingly well balanced, and you can build around anything from the start gear to full end game gear and have great success. They all feel distinct, and change how you play, too, so it's not a case of being balanced by being bland. The armour, too. So overall, the gear and game play is really rock solid.
The problem I have is in the presentation, for want of a better word. I hate how this game is put together. When you start new game, it randomly generates the world - so on a given playthrough, you might not even encounter certain bosses (and therefore miss their boss weapons, mods or armour), and quests might not be completable, you might have the quest item but the end point just doesn't exist in your world. You can reroll the world to have new items, bosses, dungeons etc, but you still have no guarantee of what you'll get until you either grind out a bunch of playthroughs or use external third party tools that were clearly developed because others hated this system as much as I do. It adds so much unnecessary grind while also adding absolutely nothing of benefit to the player. I'm not sure why they chose to do things this way, either? Surely it can't be a dev time related limit, because building the procedural system must have taken as much dev time as just building an overworld with a few more dungeon entrances?
The game also lacks clear communication - at the start you have to pick a class, but are given absolutely no information on what this actually means. You can pick up the stuff you get later, but it changes your early game run and you have to do it blind. I could easily see someone picking something that doesn't gel with them and just putting the game down thinking it sucks. Finally, base movement is woefully slow, but luckily you can easily grab a mod that sets it to 1.5x speed which makes the game feel WAY better.
Also, the story and lore is quite interesting, though the presentation I mentioned above makes absorbing it and finding it out more difficult and annoying than it needed to be.
Now, all this said, despite the bad paragraphs being longer than the good, I think the good actually outweighs the bad and that this game is worth playing, which is why what I'd like to be a neutral review slips up to a positive one. You can regularly get this on a quite reasonable sale as well, so it's worth playing for any Souls fan or Third Preson Shooter fan who wants something a little different.
