The condensed looter shooter experience
Gunfire Reborn is a looter shooter with an Asian aesthetic and a short, but extremely replayable campaign, which runs for less than an hour. It supports four-player online co-op, but this time, I was running solo. In short, it’s the full Borderlands experience without the questionable writing and Randy Pitchford.
You travel across multiple lands to purge the corruption (an ARPG classic), fighting terracotta soldiers in their crypts, sniper birds in the desert, samurai fish at the shores, and polar bears up in the frozen mountains.
Within the past few years since exiting early access, Gunfire Reborn has had seasonal events, like Path of Exile’s leagues, adding a bit of extra spice to the campaign. The fourth season (Star Link) started just a few days ago, so I thought it was a good time to get a run in with a character I wasn’t familiar with.
This run: Zi Xiao
In the head video, I’m playing as Zi Xiao, an owl who commands the stars with cards. I’m using Golden Bow, which deals immense amounts of single-target damage but is terrible with dealing with large packs of monsters. Good thing Zi Xiao’s abilities can make up for it! With the best cards, I call the stars to strike down an area in front of me.
Oh yeah, I somehow managed to get more than 100% accuracy in this run. I wonder how the game is counting that.
Yeah, it really is a fast, Asian Borderlands
Gunfire Reborn is transparently inspired by Borderlands. It features the same three core elements of Borderlands: fire, corrosion, and shock, and has the same focus on scavenging for weapons. One difference is that it relies on mechanically unique weapon designs, compared to the part-by-part weapon generation system that Borderlands has. Still, like any proper ARPG, there are piles of modifiers that can appear on any item.
Why not try…
- An octopus that sucks moisture from enemies to power a water laser
- A shotgun that’s really a small, handheld demon that eats fish and sneezes death
- A star compass that rather than shooting bullets, projects a damaging ring around you that you can grow and shrink
- The Unkempt Harold, straight from Borderlands 2
- A brick
Yeet.
Thanks for this post, I wanted to try this game but then heard, that there’s not much map variety, but you don’t seem to feel that way.
How is the co-op? Is it easy to find games with others and is it fun?
And what would you say about the DLCs?
The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.
The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.
In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.
Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.
Thank you for the elaborate response, I appreciate it. It sounds like I would enjoy the game.
Oh my Gaige, I haven’t thought of that for a while… “and I reloaded early… again.” Still played her a lot!