Showgunners Review – XCOM meets Diesel Punk

Originally known as Homicidal Allstars, Showgunners is a turn-based combat game set in a dystopian future, where corporations sponsor blood sports for millions of viewers to enjoy. As a contestant on this high-stakes reality game show, you can expect plenty of blood, glory, and insults. As for this flashy game, I’m surprised to say it doesn’t have a lot of stakes in areas that I really wish it did.

The gameplay of Showgunners follows the turn-based formula made famous by the XCOM franchise. Each round, your party of characters alternately work alongside enemy units, using the movement economy to shoot enemies, run for cover, or perform special actions like throwing grenades or preparing for suppressive fire. Some of the more interesting actions can be performed, such as melee attacks or special abilities attached to your characters.

Besides those special attacks, you have access to the same moves as your enemy and you are expected to plan accordingly, as in any given fight you are more or less armed and your careful planning is all that will ensure victory. The game alternates between these turn-based parts and third-person navigation segments, as you avoid traps and sneak up on enemies to gain an extra edge in combat.

Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the so-called “XCOM” system, and I’m sure fans of the genre will insist that it’s a mischaracterization of the mechanics. While I try to remain unbiased in these reviews, I find this style of game plays like a much slower-paced version of a Call of Duty title, mostly going cover-to-cover and rolling bullets.

This is especially true of Showgunners, which motivate them to run cover-to-cover in fights. Cover gives you extra defense against shots, reducing the chance of you getting hit. Without cover you’re basically a sitting duck, it’s easy for enemies to kill you.. assuming they don’t miss.

For a game set in an exhilarating, no-holds-barred blood sport with men wielding katanas and walking around in ornate leather jackets, it does a good job of trumping its hype by making combat feel like a slow crawl. Incentivizing you to keep cover and use the Overwatch mechanic, which punishes any enemies for moving forward, and the introduction of a universally criticized hit chance ratio in the XCOM games tanks to tense the battles. The only time I felt the need to leave cover was when the enemy refused to move, or when the map suddenly fell into explosive barrels.

Oh man, those barrel bombs. When your hero, Scarlet, can shrug off Scum bullets like they’re nerf darts, but one explosive barrel drops them to one HP, you learn to avoid things. This would be much more interesting as a mechanic, if not for the fact that these barrels have such huge diameters, which makes them a huge hazard and difficult to avoid. Each barrel can basically clear a third of the map, which means you’re dumb not to use it and even dumber to ignore it when you’re inside the yellow square of death.

The game gives you a powerful gimmick for the cover crawling experience. This artifact is called Marty, and he’s a gun-wielding pro with as much armor as he wants Need To get close to enemies to deal damage. He also starts the game six levels ahead of Scarlet, making him an invaluable asset early on.

Reloading is also a handicap that your party can use to your advantage in battles. Reloading takes a full action, which means that characters who need to reload have to sacrifice either movement or shooting on that turn. When an enemy needs to reload, you have ample opportunity to rise up at them. Just be careful with your shots, because you have to use reloads, too.

Aside from those shots, I’d say Showgunner’s gameplay is pretty good. Even as someone who isn’t a huge fan of the genre, I felt the game was well played and had a strong design philosophy for its target audience. I wish it was a little more flashy, a little more dangerous, and asked you to do more than just shoot your opponents. The gameplay doesn’t have stakes, which would be fine for many fans of the formula, but I would have liked to see more.

Something Showgunners does differently that I really like is their corporate sponsorship system. To survive in Homicidal Allstars, you must attract a sponsor. These powerful corporations provide you with useful perks, but they are not cheap – you have to earn fame by performing well in battles and signing autographs.

Plus, and this is my favorite part, sponsors want you to act a certain way. Different dialogue choices when interacting with NPCs can attract or dissuade some corporate sponsors. This is a very fun little way to make player choice matter, and reflects the nature of corporate sponsorship in a hilariously realistic way.

What Showgunners certainly has in abundance is style. The game looks great, with a gritty comic book style that fits nicely with the game’s thematic setting. The user interface looks great too, with great colors, pretty icons, and satisfying animations when cutting through enemy health bars.

All the characters look great too, especially the enemies. I wasn’t sure at first how I felt about our heroine, Scarlet, but one of my favorite parts of the game quickly became the time between matches that we spent figuring out her background. The setting is dark, as are its characters and their stories, and I’ve learned to appreciate them the more time I spend around them.

This Try Hard Guides PC review version of this game has been provided. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the game reviews section of our website! Showgunners is available at steam And gog.