Guerrilla Bob – The Next Generation of Dual-Stick Shooter

One title that we have been following closely on AppAddict.net, is Guerrilla Bob, the forthcoming dual-stick shooter from Angry Mob Games. We have been lucky enough to have been playing some of the early builds of Guerrilla Bob, containing the first few levels of the game.

Before we get into how the game plays, here’s a little background on Guerrilla Bob himself…

Guerrilla Bob’s Story

It all started with two best friends.
Bob and Johnny have been friends since they were 10, and they continued to be best buddies through high school, and then through college.

Eventually, Bob decided to enroll in the army, while Johnny chose a life of crime and money.
Bob got great achievements and got promotion after promotion until he got to be a national hero.

Jealous of his success, Johnny set him up so that Bob would look like a corrupt soldier.
So Bob was kicked out of the army.
With nothing left to do, Bob decided to get REVENGE, and became a rebel. From then on, he would go by the name Guerrilla Bob.

One day, Bob found that the army had a plan to nuke the place where his old friend Johnny had his troops. He sabotaged the plan, so he’d go in by himself and kill them all one by one.

Gameplay

Guerrilla Bob is a dual-stick (level-based) shooter. Like just about every game of this genre on the platform, you use the left virtual stick to move and the right to aim gun/shoot. Bob starts off with a machine gun, but a flame thrower and rocket launcher can also be picked up at various locations in the map. These new weapons will be added to Bob’s arsenal, instead of replacing his current weapon, and are instantly selectable by simply tapping on the new weapon. Additional items can be picked up which will permanently level-up specific weapons and there are also several power-ups which either make Bob invincible or give him super speed for a short period of time.

The game’s controls seem fairly solid, but we did have a tiny bit of difficulty with the rocket launcher firing exactly where we wanted it to go. Also there were a few instances of blown up barrels having no effect on the enemy standing next to it and a stalled out Bob, but little glitches like this are not uncommon with these early builds. We’ve been told that the controls/gameplay are still undergoing some slight tweaking before the final release, so we are sure these minor things will be addressed.

As we mentioned earlier, Guerrilla Bob is level-based, so instead of just running around and killing endless numbers of enemies (although there are quite a few), Bob must also progress forward toward the end of the level. Although, this is not as easy at it sounds! Even if you run as fast as you can, dodging bullets, bombs, flamethrowers, tanks, backhaulers and whatever else is thrown at you, you will not simply progress to the next level. Bob will need to get some blood on his hands if he wants to do that, he doesn’t have to kill every little guy, but at a minimum he must destroy every tent, turret and any end bosses, to proceed to the next level. Each level is made up of (shorter) stages so you feel like you are making good progress. At the end of a level, you are given a letter grade depending on how well you did.

Once he picks up a weapon, Bob seems to have an unlimited supply of ammo. We are not sure if this was a flag set specifically for the demo version of the game we received, or if this is how it’ll be in the final release as well. As Bob is injured, you will see this reflected in his health-meter, represented on the left side of screen in the form a burning down cigar. This cigar also contains a count of your remaining lives. When you die, you restart back at the beginning of the level, but the enemies you already killed do not respawn. From the map screen, the final game looks like it’ll contain 8 levels. Each of the levels we played took, on average, 20 minutes to complete. So that means the final game will probably have about 2-3 hours of initial gameplay (not counting replay).

The graphics of Guerrilla Bob are every bit as stunning as the screenshots and trailer videos make them out to be. The music was okay, but nothing spectacular, in fact a bit repetitive. We are not sure if this was the final music or not. The game had two level options EASY and HARD, and even at the EASY setting the game was fairly challenging. Let’s just say, we were very grateful that Bob had an unlimited supply of lives in our build of the game. The main menu also mentioned something titled ONLINE, that was not currently selectable . We are very curious as to what this could mean…most likely online leaderboards? Although we think two player co-op, CONTRA style would be pretty neat or perhaps some sort of online multiplayer set in this setting would be really awesome! Right now this is all just speculation, until we can find out more. This will probably remain a mystery until the final release.

Progress

As far as the game’s progress, there have been several big announcements recently. First, it appears that Angry Mob Games has teamed with Chillingo, who will now be publishing this title. This is excellent news, as we are big fans of Chillingo and the many titles they have put out under both their main and Clickgamer labels. On the other hand, this is a rather interesting development in one respect, since Guerrilla Bob will be a strong competitor for MiniGore (another of Chillingo’s flagship titles). There are many people who felt a bit let down by MiniGore’s lack of “real levels” and Guerrilla Bob feels like what we had always hoped MiniGore would be. Finally, probably the best news for those clammoring to get their hands on Guerrilla Bob…we are happy to report that the developers just announced that they should be readyto submit a build to apple for review at the end of next week!