Gal*Gun 2 Review (PS4)

It hasn’t even been a full two years since Gal*Gun: Double Peace caused a bit of a stir upon its PlayStation 4 launch, but in a desperate attempt to satisfy your kink, developer Inti Creates is back with a sequel. You won’t be surprised to hear then that Gal*Gun 2 attempts to be just as titillating as its predecessor, but again fails to provide a compelling gameplay experience.

Bored during class one day, the schoolboy at the heart of the story discovers a new app on his phone that he can’t delete. Upon opening it, a box with a headset and a hair dryer inside appears alongside an angel from the Angel Ring Company. She tells you that you’ve been selected to help in the fight against girls that are becoming possessed by demons, whom have the intention of taking over the world.

It’s a paper-thin plot that doesn’t build up to anything meaningful in the slightest. You’ll continuously do battle with the demon at the heart of it all, Kurona, but her motivations never really become clear, and thus we never felt invested in anything happening on-screen. We finished the game with the “Normal ending”, which leads us to believe there’s multiple conclusions to the demonic happenings, but due to how utterly lacklustre the base outcome is, we’d be hard-pressed to believe they’re much better.

Much like its precursor, Gal*Gun 2 is an on-rails shooter that pits you against an army of schoolgirls who have suddenly become infatuated with you. To cure them of their lust, you must shoot them with the Demon Swapper, the transformed hair dryer you received at the start of the game. Aiming your shots in the right places will help the girls reach “Euphoria”, and we think it’s rather obvious where you’ll need to be placing your shots and what the sense of feeling the girls get really is. To speed this process up, hitting a female in the right spot will result in an Ecstasy shot, helping the girl to climax straight away.

Clearing out an area of schoolgirls allows you to progress further through the level, selecting pre-determined positions within the environment. To mix things up, the demonic presence will sometimes take a physical form as they latch onto girls, making them a tougher opponent in the process. Here, you’ll need to aim for the small monsters first before focusing on helping the girl reach euphoria. A Lovestrike is another way to deal with a larger group of females, where gazing into a certain female’s eyes for a period of time will cause an explosion that brings euphoria to all.

The game is structured around accepting missions from your phone, whereby you’ll aid girls spread throughout the school and gain Demon Buster points in the process. Side missions switch things up a little with levels that task you with defending girls from demons or hunting down a certain item within the vicinity, but besides that, that’s your lot in terms of content.

And honestly, Gal*Gun 2 is just really quite boring. The on-rails shooting mechanics are incredibly simple, every main mission feels the same, and there’s very little variety in the locales you’ll visit. We felt like we were on auto-pilot for the majority of the game, as you can get by just fine via spamming the X button to cure the girls. Repetition sets in far too quickly thanks to the lack of mechanics to engage with, and so you’re left with what feels like a glorified shooting gallery. Boss battles are ever so slightly different, but when it comes down to it, all you’ll be doing is a lot of shooting. Gal*Gun 2 would have been a far better game if it had even an ounce of variety injected into it, but in its current state, it’s the definition of a bare-bones experience.

Outside of the six hour campaign, a Score Attack mode may tempt you into returning to a select few stages in order to achieve a high score, but even then you’ll still be going through the same exact motions as the single player outing.

Gal*Gun 2 does manage to look better than its 2016 counterpart, partly thanks to the fact it no longer has to worry about scaling down to the PlayStation Vita, but that still isn’t exactly saying much. Environments are sparse when it comes to detail, character models are lacking despite their perverse nature, and the basic presentation of menus only works against the title. You’ll glean some visual pleasure from the experience, but not in the traditional sense.