It used to be that a gun was a simple device overall, at least in gaming. Point, shoot, done. Some guns shot bullets with variations on speed, range and projectile volume, while others shot zappy lasers or explosives. As gaming went on, though, guns slowly evolved from “force at a distance” to “…and anything else you might think of”. Meanwhile games like the Enter the Gungeon and the Borderlands series went insane with the design, creating more and more ways for a person over here to drop an enemy over there. Guns can do a huge number of things, and in Stack Gun Heroes you get to build your own massive beast of multi-functional destruction.
The basic plot is you’re a heroic robot with a home base and there’s a universe of people needing to be saved from baddie-bots. Home base comes with a number of resources, such as a store for buying new gun parts, a superpower dealer and a giant open area you’ll eventually develop into a resource factory, but at the start the hero-bot doesn’t have to worry about too much of that. It’s got a gun and the intro tutorial walks you through buying and attaching an upgrade, and for the moment that’s good enough. A quick walk to the teleporter takes you to the first mission and then things start getting complicated.
The starting gun is a weak little thing with basic stats, able to fire a low-level energy orb, but that first upgrade could change everything. Upgrades are color-coded for power, starting with grey and working through the spectrum, with the possible effects getting more extreme as they go. The thing is, each upgrade is balanced by a downgrade, so a boost in damage might also slow down bullet velocity. No matter what type of gun you build bullets can only travel so far, so a slower bullet won’t have the range of a faster one. If you’re not careful with balancing stats it’s easy to make a gun with massive damage that will explode in your face, whether that be from short range, accuracy reduction or even a wave pattern so extreme there’s no way to avoid shooting the floor. The shop at home base updates with every purchase, though, so while most upgrades are pure garbage, it’s easy to refresh the selection.
The gun is also meant to be constantly switched around, and changing modules is as easy as hitting Tab and restacking. In the beginning you’re able to only add one attachment but it doesn’t take more than a mission or two to be able to afford an upgrade, with each purchased gun level adding another layer to stack more mods on top. After a few missions it’s easy to end up with over a dozen available mods, some of which earn a near-permanent spot in the gun and others getting swapped out as the mission requires. Accuracy may be less necessary than pure damage in an area so dumping the explosive mod and replacing it with something punchier that requires getting right in the enemy-bot’s face to score a hit can be a viable tactic.
Aiding in the firefight is that each player gets a unique superpower to call their own. You might get to call down an air strike, or teleport, or really pretty much anything. In my game I’ve started with a power that drops a manually-triggered mine. I can set it off at any time and it teleports over any enemy bot below a set hit point threshold and destroys them. It’s great for mid-range fights but has no effect on higher level robots, although all superpowers can also be upgraded back at base to scale with the rising challenge.
The missions are doled out in a giant teleportation room, and one of the goals of progression is opening up the harder levels by upgrading the base. Choosing a mission is usually as simple as paging through the available ones, color-coded the same as the weapon upgrades in the store, and choosing something with a payout that fits whatever the next purchase you’re working toward may be. At this point you’re teleported to a combat arena with a virus canister in the back. The fight doesn’t begin until you tell it to, meaning you get to look around a bit and get a sense of the procedurally-generated layout before triggering the action. Each arena is a flat zone with sci-fi crates and ammo dispensers scattered about, sometimes slightly maze-ish and other times a straight line to the back, and once the fight begins the enemy robots will try to carry that canister all the way to the entry point. The object is to prevent a couple of waves of robots from uploading the virus, blasting everything that moves while picking up scrap and other drops when possible.
Once the fight is won, or lost then lost then lost again and finally won, the arena breaks out in bouncing coins which you’ve got a few seconds to collect before being teleported back home, where it’s time to give the base some attention. The most common enemy drop, for example, is juice, and like weapons and missions it’s also color-coded. Juice goes into chargers and scrap into recyclers, which convert them to batteries and blocks, respectively. Batteries are a secondary type of currency used to upgrade things needing energy, such as the teleporter needing a number of pink batteries to be able to permanently access amber missions. Blocks, on the other hand, let you build more floor space, because building the chargers required to convert juice needs a decent amount of space, and like everything else in the game construction is done by stacking the right mod on the gun barrel and firing away. Stack Gun Heroes soon settles into a rhythm of fight, upgrade base, fight more, upgrade base more, earn newer harder fights, restack gun to build the biggest, meanest, explodiest weapon possible, and maybe also the weirdest. You never know when a grenade launcher that attaches turrets to whatever it hits might come in handy, after all.
Stack Gun Heroes has been in development for a couple of years now and received its first demo as part of the Steam Next Fest. It’s clearly a work in progress, with a lot of work to do for optimization and maybe having less in the way of unusable junk gun mods cluttering up the store, but it plays fast while featuring heavy pyrotechnics and once you’ve got a good range of mods it’s a lot of fun to experiment with gun creation. There’s also an entertaining sense of humor running underneath the whole game, especially in the loading-screen mission descriptions and victory results, which goes a long way to livening up what could have been a sterile tone in the environments. There’s polish left to go to see Stack Gun Heroes ready for release, but the core is solid and the build towards a personalized weapon as weird as it is powerful is a quest that’s impossible to pass up.
