Guns & Fishes Preview

On paper, the first-person speedrun shooter Guns & Fishes sounds hilarious. You play as a Diver, battling against the Shark Yakuza and do so using guns which fire various fish! That’s silly fun!

There isn’t actually any story in the game — at least currently — you’re just plonked in levels and a walrus occasionally hands you a new weapon. Ammo is limited, but your handgun gets replenished every time you start a level or restart at a checkpoint. For the rest, however, you need to grab it from downed enemies, though it does persist after deaths and in new levels.

You play through various roof-level city scapes, running, jumping, and wall-running as you shoot at faceless ragdolls who have swords, pistols, or sniper rifles. Eventually, you get access to a grappling hook, too, which is required to progress in later levels, not just make traversal faster.

Unfortunately, the grappling hook has a cooldown based on however long it takes to retract from full length, no matter if you miss or are using it for a short jump. In my time with the game, the “full length” seemed to vary, as it was sometimes able to reach further than others.

The most frustrating thing about the game, however, is that there are 16 seconds of music. It loops constantly, the same 16 seconds every 16 seconds. It would be less noticeable if they removed the half-second of silence right at the start of the MP3 file, but they didn’t.

Traversal can be hit and miss, but that’s kind of the point of the game. You have to use the spongey physics to get better times in each level, so you might be halfway through a wall-run and then fly off in a random direction at 40mph. Or, you know, a direction that you chose from repeated plays. I found it frustrating, but as I said, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

The weapons are fun, with not just fish but aquatic life like the squid and octopi weapons in there, too. The blowfish being a bazooka is really funny to me. And you reload by shoving the creature in question into the barrel of the gun!

Unfortunately, there’s little variety between levels, so Guns & Fishes is quite lacklustre in practice. You can avoid enemies for most of each level, and really only need to kill a set amount right at the end to finish. If the developer returns to this, hopefully they can make some improvements, but it hasn’t been updated in over two years at the time of writing. And seeing as the game came out just over two years ago at the time of writing…