Gunhouse is a very strange mix of tower defense and puzzle game about matching blocks and using special weapons and abilities to protect your house from wave after wave of strange and unique enemies. With a very interesting visual style, great music and solid mechanics, I had a good time with this game, even if the core of the puzzle system felt a bit hard to grapple with for a big chunk of my time with it and the variety of weapons and powers left me more perplexed than anything else. I finished this one, so you know it’s at least up there in my book!
The core of the puzzle systems in Gunhouse is as follows; You have a grid of 3x6 tiles that you have to match into 2x2 or bigger blocks. To do so, you can swipe rows left and right, which will make blocks fall down and hopefully combine with other nearby identical blocks. When you have your blocks formed, you can move them left to create guns and right to set them up as special powers. From the beginning of the game to at least 3/4 of my time with it, I had difficulties figuring out how to make my blocks move where I wanted to. It clicked after a while, but I felt like I was swiping aimlessly for a good chunk of it. You do this during timed rounds where you have a few seconds to set up your guns before it’s time to fight. I’m not a big fan of how way before the time is out the house will start to shut down from the top and you basically have less time than what’s shown to move the blocks at the top of the screen. You also have a queue of block types at the top of the screen; loading them up gives their associated gun more ammo.
Then enemies attack your house. These enemies are colorful, wacky and have very interesting designs. You use guns and special powers with similarly cool visuals and various effects to fight them. Some weapons just fire in a straight line, other track your foes, some deal damage over time (maybe?) others fire bouncy balls. The special powers do similar things but in a greater fashion (while the ice gun shoots at enemies and slows them down, the ice special power covers the field in snowballs). You get more shots and powerful effects the bigger you manage to make the blocks before loading them. It’s a bit of a shame that you don’t have hard info on what the guns actually do. Which gun deals more damage? What are their effects? Are some enemies weaker to certain types of weapons, or can you use what you prefer visually and based on some vague impression of what they do?
Between rounds, based on the money you got, you can purchase new guns and upgrade your guns, house health, healing and armor. The health is pretty straightforward (you get more hearts) but the healing and armor aren’t well explained. Enemies seems to get tougher over time, but after a while I had my favorite setup and ran with it. All bosses have very unique designs and the game gives you a few side missions to try and make more cash, so there is plenty of fun to be had in Gunhouse. I recommend you play it if you enjoy puzzle games!
