Game Review: Gal*Gun: Double Peace (PS Vita)

A tale of panties and loading screens. Mostly panties.

Gal*Gun: Double Peace is a rail-shooter where you shoot pheromone shots to make girls… well, let’s be honest, this is a game about making girls orgasm. If you are not into that, you should probably just leave.

The gist of the story is that you get shot by a Cupid Angel and for a day, you’re irresistible to girls. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, the thing is, the shot was too potent and you now only have until day’s end to find the love of your life.

Choices will be made. The future will be decided. And well, a lot of pheromone shooting will ensue.

I want to be clear, straight from the off, that I don’t mind lewd games. I think they are a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment just as any other. I actually rather like some of the riskier games on the Vita, like Shinovi Versus and Estival Versus, the two main Senran Kagura entires for our handheld. So when PQube announced that they were bringing this West, I got in touch with them. Right after I recovered from the sheer shock of this game getting a rating in North America and Europe.

Be careful who you shoot, and what with.

Now, the story gets a bit more personal as the game progresses and I don’t want to spoil it, but I actually found myself properly curious as to what would happen. Well done INTI for creating something that makes you think among all the goodies. It can be hard to make you care about the characters when the content has so much fan service. Gal*Gun somehow pulls it off.

It’s really fun, too. When I first started playing I thought I’d get bored of it within 5 minutes. But I found myself playing for about an hour at a time, and enjoying every minute. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the game and the story never cease to evolve. You get a bit more gameplay and a bit more narrative the more you play, and it feels like a very fresh game right until the end.

Playing this game in public can get you in a sticky situation. Specially if you have the sound on.

Not all is rosy in the land of Gal*Gun, though.

That end? It comes after a mere 3 to 4 hours of gameplay. And while there’s a lot of extra content after finishing the first story, a lot of it (and specially the mechanics) remains unchanged. The extra content is there, but I’m unsure as to how appealing it’ll be to complete it.

Another major issue I had was loading screens. They come often and overstay their welcome every single time. I know Unity is not hailed as the best-running engine on Vita, and the rest of the game actually runs great, but sometimes the loading times are quite long and it completely takes you out of the experience.

To end on a more positive note, though, the game looks great and runs almost without a hitch. The voice acting, while somewhat limited, is really fun and brings the main characters to life. The music is nothing to write home about, though, but I don’t think it matters that much due to the frantic nature of rail-shooters… you can mostly hear sound effects anyway.