Gunbrella was provided by Devolver Digital for review. Thank you!
Gunbrella is an action platformer where you will go on a quest for revenge using the greatest weapon combination I have seen recently: an umbrella with a gun stuffed in it. After playing the game, which feels like a Devolver Digital production, I am left with a wonderful feeling that the developer, doinksoft, hit it out of the park with this idea.
The star of the show is the title of the game, and platforming, combat, and traversal all revolve around it. Using the Gunbrella, you will be able to pump enemies with an assortment of different types of ammo and choose the direction you can shoot. You can also boost yourself in any direction to get some major air, which can help you navigate tall buildings and open up your umbrella to glide down, deflect projectiles, and utilize zip lines. You can combine all these abilities, creating epic moments of boosting in the air, shooting an enemy below, boosting again to a zipline, sliding down it, and then shooting another enemy. It is glorious.
Taking place in a gorgeous, pixel noir-punk world, you are on a quest to avenge your wife, whom an unknown group murdered. While pursuing them, you will encounter various enemies, including the normal grunts, flying cult members, lizards, giant blobs of gory tentacle beings with a ton of eyeballs, and many more. I love how well-crafted the world is, with an interesting story that kept me curious about what was right around the corner and what happened when you were picking apples to bring home to your family.
Then, we have Gunbrella’s performance on the Steam Deck, which is equally fantastic.
Gunbrella – Steam Deck Performance
When starting up Gunbrella, it’s clear the game wouldn’t need any setting changes, running at a solid 60 FPS with a 7W – 8W drain. This held up for a bit until I got to Allendale. The Allendale station started to cause the CPU to spike, making the battery drain go up to 13W – 14W. This immediately went down as soon as I got out of there, but setting a TDP limit of 5 stopped that from going up and capped it around 9.6W.
So, keeping the TDP limit at 5 kept the game below 10W of battery drain, stuck to a solid 60 FPS, and made the experience as great as possible.
Accessibility
Gunbrella doesn’t have a ton of accessibility options, but it does have a way to turn film grain and screen shake off, change different audio settings, remap controls, and change the language.
It doesn’t support 16:10 resolutions, so there are some black bars, but there is full controller and cloud save support.
Conclusion
Gunbrella is a wonderful action platformer that expands a unique concept into an enjoyable experience. Using the Gunbrella as a multi-tool to traverse around a punk-noir world and take down enemies is a ton of fun, thanks to being able to combine different abilities and chain together some awesome combos. On top of that, the game performs quite well on the Steam Deck, which elevates the fun even further. This is easily my favorite way to play, and I highly recommend it!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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