Roguelikes and Roguelites were all the rage for a good few years between the Battle Royale boom and Hero Shooter craze. We had everything from authentic ASCII-style roguelikes to the king of them all, Hades.

There’s one unavoidable problem that roguelikes, more than any other genre, need to face head on, and not all of them do it with such grace as Gunfire Reborn.

Repeat Without Repetition

Roguelikes are built around repeating content, but with twists and gradual changes from “run” to “run”. In some games this progression and change is wholly within the player, the game changes because you understand it more and more each run.

In others, the change is more stark, with new enemies or items retroactively added to earlier levels in future runs once you uncover them.

These repetitions and changes are normally things like weapons to use, room types to find, characters to meet and items or buffs to attain.

The key to an excellent modern roguelike is making repetition not feel repetitive.

These are all vital gameplay elements for sure, but so many roguelikes miss the visual possibilities when it comes to roguelike mechanics.

Visual Variety Can Mean More Than “Gameplay” Variety

This is where Gunfire Reborn excels. While the game of course has hundreds of unlockable weapons and just as many build-changing “Scrolls” (Passive buffs or abilities) these are kind of “expected”.

That’s impressive, but it’s also the minimum to qualify as a decent Roguelike.

So, Gunfire does more.

Gunfire combines all that gameplay variety with a truly absurd visual variety. We have “traditional” guns, bows, lizards you squeeze to shoot fireballs, a deck of cards you cast magic through, sci-fi weapons, fantasy weapons all wielded by cute characters modelled after different animals.

Right from the start, the visual design matches the gameplay design in terms of variety.

Variety Needs To Be Immediately Obvious

To see how much difference that makes we can compare to something like RoboQuest.

RoboQuest is an FPS Roguelike just like Gunfire, but all the enemies are robots. They come in different shapes and sizes, and some are even robots of animals like a giant digger robot modelled after a mole (of course), but at the end of the day that novelty can wear thin in 2 or 3 runs.

“Robots – but different” simply isn’t enough of a jump from “Robots” to make a lasting effect on the variety of the game.

It’s not that the robot designs are bad, or boring, and in a linear story-based FPS they’d be perfect. But in a Roguelike, you are seeing these enemies and bosses a lot.

No matter how clever the singular design or detail is, if the enemies are all “Robots, but…” then the variety will not feel like it’s there.

For variety to count to the player over the course of 100’s of runs, it needs to be immediately obvious and unavoidably noticeable.

Gunfire Reborn’s Beautiful Biomes

Gunfire does this by having a set visual style, but applied to multiple genres of weapons and enemies.

Rather than choosing one genre of enemy like “robots”, Gunfire instead themes entire areas around different ideas and allows that to inform enemy design in each area independently.

You can see an enemy in Gunfire and know what act they’re from because each area is so distinct. Even 100 runs in it’s fun to get to certain areas and remember “Oh yeah we get the lil’ red boars here, cute”.

I can’t think of a single enemy that appears in multiple biomes, and honestly no enemy would fit into any others.

Some examples:

Roguelikes Play By Different Rules

Normally, I’d advocate for gameplay and content above all else. I happily suffer 30fps because it’s the only way to experience Bloodborne.

But, Roguelikes are unique in that a core gameplay loop is relatively “easy” to design. You have a pretty standardised format, overall. It’s what you do with that format which matters, and so visual design and variety begins mattering a whole lot more.

RoboQuest might get as deep and varied as Gunfire gameplay-wise, but I’ll never know because I was sick of Robots past area 2. In Gunfire by the end of area 2 I’ve fought a variety of enemies both animal and construct, one boss which could have been a mythological monkey or a rock golem depending on the run, and then fought through a western town with seagull snipers and lizard wizards.

If you’re after a game to reignite the Roguelike spark, I cannot recommend Gunfire Reborn enough, especially in Co-Op. The game is tight enough for FPS veterans, deep enough for adaptive roguelike fans and yet simple enough to pick up and play that your party can hop on no worries.

Let me know your favourite area and enemy if you check it, there’s so many to see!