![]() Taking a hit doesn’t pop up a menu asking if you want to restart, but rather sees the scavenger dragged across the level to try again, and again, and again over and over until you get it right this time. Death is only a mild inconvenience, though, thanks to both the short levels and near instant auto-restart. It’s possible someone has beaten the game with fewer than 1,000 deaths but it doesn’t seem likely. Fortunately there’s no limit on the life stock, although the game keeps count of how many times you’ve died per level with a running total at the title screen. The scavenger can only take a single hit before being rocketed back to the start of the level, and the checkpoints that were so nicely provided in the first few levels don’t stick around long. There are a million ways to die and every single one is perfectly placed to take advantage of an imperfect use of your machine-gun thruster. Energy barriers with the emitters on top or bottom (or both back-to-back) are instant death unless destroyed, enemy ships fly in weaving patterns, gun emplacements fire walls of flame diagonally across the screen, flamethrowers are made of hatred and spite, etc. Another level will have barrels blocking the path, requiring you to time out a precious quarter-second of hang time to shoot a few bullets forward, blasting them away so you don’t get pushed off the back of the screen. Spiked corridors rise and fall at different angles, requiring a specific tempo on the shoot-thrust button to not only maintain a safe path but also snag the atomiks that aren’t so polite as to hover safely in the center. There may only be eight to twelve atomiks in a single stage but the level design wrings every drop of gameplay from the scavenger’s movements. This is where RunGunJumpGun gets properly evil. They’re sitting right there, though, and if most are relatively simple that makes the outliers placed at the edge of a spike, near spinning sawblades, or in the path of swarm of fireballs that much more tempting to chase after. Mastering a level means developing a near-instinctual sense for the scavenger’s movement, and while just getting through may only be difficult, getting a full set of the atomiks can be brutal. ![]() The gun’s recoil only takes effect when shooting down, and the zippy forward auto-scrolling maintains the same pace no matter how furiously the gun is pushing against it. Successful play is a combination of learning the hazard placement and mastering the speed of rising and falling, with special attention paid to both initial acceleration and hang-time before gravity kicks in. This is where things start getting tricky.Įach level of RunGunJumpGun is maybe fifteen to twenty seconds long, if played successfully. ![]() The gun shoots in a constant meaty blast no matter which way it’s facing, and while firing forward clears out anything in the way after a few hits, the recoil from shooting down sends the scavenger flying into the air. A helmeted scavenger wielding a chaingun runs along at a set pace and can do one of two things- fire down, or fire forward. ![]() RunGunJumpGun has ten semi-friendly levels to get started with, easing into its action with helpful checkpoints to get you up to speed. There are a total of two buttons to play with, no gamepad input at all and the simplicity of the controls feeds into the surgical precision necessary to not just survive RunGunJumpGun but reap a harvest of the collectible atomics that are so temptingly placed near certain doom. And a few dozen more times after that, learning the nuances of each level while getting mad at yourself for repeating the same mistakes, but getting a little bit farther until the current micro-level falls due to a combination of growing skill and pure bloody-minded determination. Shoot down, shoot forward, die, start again.
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