On-rails shooters have always had a strong appeal for me. I love playing them in arcades and even on home consoles, it's kind of like a snack in gaming format. All the appeal of blasting through enemies, with none of the added complexity of typical shooters. Gal Gun takes this concept and marries it with ecchi anime. A brilliant idea... until you notice the 50 euro price tag.
The story kicks off when a cupid-in-training attempts to help your loser character out. She lines up the shot, but oh no! Her bow was set to fully automatic. You get perforated by a dozen arrows and pass out on the spot. When you wake up, you find that every woman in the world is now attracted to you. They are all dying to confess their love and will beeline your way the moment they see you.
Patako the Cupid then explains the issue. While all this female attention may be nice, it is only temporary and comes with a massive trade-off. If you don't have a girlfriend by the time the effect wears off, then you'll never be appealing to women again. No girlfriend or wife or anything for as long as you live. Fortunately our protagonist knows 4 girls who would make an amazing girlfriend. Unfortunately, they are the only 4 people in the world that appear immune to the cupid magic.
You pick what girl to go for and then tackle less-than-a-handful of stages. You automatically wander through streets, classrooms, and hallways, while girls will try to ambush you non-stop. They hide around corners, climb over fences, even jump out of windows. All to catch you off-guard with their love confessions. If they succeed, this wears down the health meter that represents your conviction. I.e. you get so absorbed in the momentary attention that you lose sight of the girl that truly matters.
To prevent this, you blast the girls with pheromones. Simply target them and start shooting until they fall over; too charmed to keep pursuing you. Each girl has a weak spot that will take them down immediately, though hitting them enough anywhere else will also do the trick. Hitting this weak spot does also fill up a heart meter that allows you to use Doki Doki Mode. In this mode you target one of the girls and then play a mini-game where you stare at their body. This overwhelms them with love that then explodes outward, taking down every other girl on-screen along with them.
Most stages are capped off with dialogue sequences between you and the girl of choice. You get dialogue options and sometimes a special boss battle. Play your cards right, rack up a good score, and you'll eventually walk away with a romantic ending. Depending on how you play, it's also possible to get a Bad or True ending to the story.
This may all sound pretty fun and quirky. A naughty on-rails shooter where you make hordes of girls swoon for you. Its fanservice converted into gameplay! Yeah that's what I thought too. Then I reached the credits after about an hour.
Gal Gun is incredibly easy and incredibly short. Its handful of stages take mere minutes to complete and pose almost no challenge, even on the highest difficulty. An entire level might just be you getting up from your desk and leaving the classroom. Sure, you have to take down like 30 girls on the way out, but it's less than 10 meters in total. The levels aren't even structured particularly well. Your character often moves through them so quickly that the girls don't even have the chance to act. Their "attacks" go off, but we just walk away from it before taking damage.
Each route does have some unique stages and dialogue sequences, but there is a lot of reuse between them. I got bored midway through my third playthrough because it was just more of the same with a different anime stereotype acting as a coat of paint. 2,5 hours of game time for 50 bucks is pretty miserable.
Gal Gun leans heavily on its extra content to make this proposition seem worth it. Every playthrough rewards you with feathers, which can be used to fill out a gallery of art. There are nearly 200 art pieces, for which you'll need to replay the game over and over again to amass the necessary feathers. Each character also has its own profile that you unlock. No, not just the main characters. Everyone! Those hordes of girls that harass you throughout the game? All of them are named characters that you are encouraged to hunt down for their profile.
This, however, isn't exactly tantalizing as optional content. Most of these characters are so generic they may as well have been randomly generated. You have no interactions with them outside of the few seconds it takes to fend them off. They're largely forgettable, so I wasn't exactly eager to put in the excessive effort required to get more background info on them. Especially since filling out the profiles requires to use Doki Doki Mode on them, which is a limited resource. Doing so multiple times on each individual girl would be an insane effort requiring countless playthroughs.
Gal Gun also has True Endings to achieve for each of the 4 main girls. To get these, you play the game as you would normally, but have to reach the end with certain parameters in place. This mostly comes down to your personality stats. At the start of the game you fill out a personality test and get rated for Athleticism, Intelligence, Stylishness, and Lewdness. These don't matter during normal play, but have to be exactly right if you want a True Ending. Alongside meeting various other (invisible) conditions.
Each time you use Doki Doki Mode on a girl, these personality values shift. How exactly they change depends on which girl you hit. Use it on a nerd and you'll probably see Intelligence go up while Athleticism decreases. This is a pain in the ass. You either need to never use Doki Doki Mode, luck out, or memorize what stats any character gives you. It is a crazy amount of effort, just to get a slightly more elaborate variation on the regular ending.
At this point I should stipulate that Gal Gun isn't hentai. Even comparing it to ecchi anime before is making it seem far more inappropriate than it really is. The True Ending you put so much effort into isn't more lewd or anything. All that art and the profile you're urged to collect, none of that is erotic either. Even ogling the girls in Doki Doki Mode is kept relatively tame by modest outfits and camera angles. Outside of the sounds the girls make as they swoon over you, there's nothing risque about Gal Gun.
I point this out because typically hentai and eroge games get away with design that is annoying or below-par because of their erotic appeal. Gal Gun has the underwhelming design, but nothing to excuse it with. Except for asking players to commit to an absurd grind, of course. This could be passable at a stretch if either the game was erotica or exceptionally well-written. Though even if either (or both) of those were true, the price tag would still be excessive.
Gal Gun is severely overpriced and underambitious. It has a novel premise that draws anime fans in, but doesn't succeed in backing it up with worthwhile gameplay. Asking 50 bucks for it is borderline criminal. If you absolutely have to try it, I would only recommend it at a hefty discount and to try refunding it once the novelty wears out.
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