Gunpowder on the Teeth: Arcade

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Gunpowder on the Teeth: Arcade is an Action-Platformer with a monochrome aesthetic that seems intended to evoke the look and feel of old war footage, crossed with some well-animated pixel art graphics.

Visually, this game looks fantastic. There’s a lot of detail here, like the way the grass is blown around by the approaching helicopter, or the animation of your character as it bounces around. However, while the black and white aesthetic does a good job of evoking a certain feel, it hinders the gameplay, since it makes obstacles like barbed wire much harder to see.

As for that gameplay, this game is frustratingly hard, and punishingly so, at that. Between barbed wire I couldn’t see, enemies I couldn’t shoot without landing first, and levels designed with a sharp difficulty curve, this game seems almost like it was intended to frustrate players. What’s sad is, it feels like there’s some good gameplay hidden under the surface here, but it’s just too hard to appreciate it with all the frustrating game design choices.

Given that there are so many good Action-Platformers on the Switch, it’s hard to recommend one that seems like it has a lot of potential but is just too frustrating to play Gunpowder on the Teeth has a lot of great elements to it, but as a whole it’s simply not very fun.

tl;dr – Gunpowder on the Teeth: Arcade is an Action-Platformer with a black-and-white war footage aesthetic, which looks great, but unfortunately makes the game more frustrating to play… and this is a game loaded with frustrations. If you like your games super-difficult, you might enjoy this, but most players are better off looking elsewhere.

Grade: C

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