Wildcat Gun Machine Review

Wildcat Gun Machine is a top-down high-intensity run and gun bullet hell, you dungeon crawl your way through monstrous hordes as you unlock a vast array of weaponry to take down huge bosses and try not to get your head ripped off there’s virtually no story whatsoever in the game and nothing is really even explained regarding its protagonist or why she loves cats so much.

The game’s first three acts follow a similar formula you’ll need to destroy room after room of enemies unlocking keys and defeating the stage’s two mini bosses to unlock the major boss and move on to the next act with the final act having a format on its own. What I really wasn’t a fan of was the level design, Wildcat Gun Machine’s version of dungeon crawling is almost just rectangular room after rectangular room of enemies with only minor variations to even distinguish them apart, each act does have a very different artistic feel which is nice but these levels hardly ever make you rethink your strategy of just running around the perimeter shooting enemies and outrunning their bullets, what does shine in these levels though is the wide cast of enemies for you to take down as you progress through each act and in between acts the game finds new ways to kill you with creative enemy types that never felt reused and scale the craziness well into the latter half of the game, in fact a lot of the excitement for entering a new act was discovering what type of goons you’d be facing off against from flying insects to giant tentacled meat sacks.

Act one felt like a very lukewarm introduction to the game due to how easy the fights were and how basic your weaponry, fortunately each act is harder all the way up to the near impossible and highly frustrating final boss. The best part about Wildcat Gun Machine though is its large arsenal of weaponry with over 40 different guns ranging from laser beams and grenade launchers to homing bullets and sniper rifles, there’s a lot to unlock and try out as you take down enemies you’ll earn bones that you can then spend at these obelisk-like checkpoints there aren’t any refunds though so sometimes you’ll end up spending your hard-earned currency on something that sounds a lot cooler than it is but more than likely you’re going to want to unlock everything to try it all out in levels, you can also upgrade your cats, these felines allow you to revive yourself so you don’t have to go all the way back to the checkpoint when you die, though the most important upgrades are to your gun machine, as you kill enemies your gun machine meter will charge and when you finally fill it up you can transform yourself into an invincible killing machine with some serious weaponry, with each act boss downed you take on part of their essence as a new mod for your gun machine from heat seeking missiles to spreading fire, it has this really cool satisfying super saiyan animation when you jump into your machine and for those brief 10 or so seconds it is the pinnacle of fun that the game offers players, especially when you’re surrounded by foes on the brink of death and you just hop in and lay waste to everybody.

All of these upgrades and enemies combined to make the combat really superb, kill animations are satisfying, dashing around and shooting feels smooth and the gameplay loop of killing and buying new weapons is addicting. We definitely recommend Wildcat Gun Machine to any fans of the bullet hell genre.

Purchase Wildcat Gun Machine on Steam!