Guerrilla Bob looks like he’s a cigar-chomping, bad-guy-stomping soldier with a gruff voice and a lot of killer weaponry, but he’s not. He also used to be the best friend of John Gore (of Minigore fame) until the two had a falling out, and so Mr. Gore actually plays the role of your arch nemesis throughout the campaign mode. It sounds epic, but it’s not.
Only the graphics are “wicked”
The sad thing about Guerrilla Bob is that it looks so darn good. I would say “damn good”, but I don’t want to make ol’ Bob blush. Everything about Guerilla Bob is corny, and not in a charming B-Movie, Bruce Campbell kind of way. Guerilla Bob’s hero isn’t Duke Nukem, but rather the Mario Bros. These are other action heroes who fight evil, but do it in a very goofy, cartoony, and basically harmless way. That’s not to say that I expected brutal neck-snapping, head-shotting action from Guerrilla Bob, but the dual stick shooter action we’ve come to expect from iPhone titles like Minigore, iDracula, and Alive-4-ever has been castrated in this title.
There are a lot of different and impressive graphical effects in Guerrilla Bob, but none of them feel quite right. Many bullet weapons lack punch, explosives fizzle like firecrackers, and all enemies simply topple over, as if they’re taking a nap — not like they’ve been ventilated by a high-powered minigun. I could go on about this, but there are other reasons not to play Guerrilla Bob aside from the lackluster weapons and combat.
Mutated Saved Games
Guerilla Bob features four save slots for your saved games, but they’re handled in a truly ridiculous fashion. There are currently three modes of play in Guerrilla Bob: Survival, Arcade, and Mercenary. Arcade and Mercenary modes are basically a campaign mode — with arcade forcing you to find weapon pickups throughout the levels, and mercenary allowing you cash to buy upgrades after completing a level. The game is kind enough to auto-save for you (as you’d expect most iPhone games to do), but should you lose all of your allotted lives, the game will actually *delete* the saved slot you were using. This is an absolutely absurd way to handle a saved game, and it actually nuked my campaign progress twice before I realized how this roundabout system worked. You can actually get around it by occupying at least two saved slots — so that if you die, you’ll always have some sort of save to fall back on, but it’s still completely ridiculous. The number of saved slots also seems arbitrary when you consider my next observation.
Those four saved slots only count towards the one game mode your’e currently in. So if you’re playing an Arcade campaign, and you’ve finished four out of the seven levels, you can’t just take a break from the story and play some mindless Survival mode. Doing so will actually destroy your saved games (yes, all four slots). The same goes for trying to play a separate Mercenary mode while trying to keep your Arcade saves going. This is one of the first games I’ve seen that will only let you enjoy one game mode at a time, and it’s one of the most backwards, anti-fun gaming practices I’ve ever seen.
Mucho Dolor
It is possible to play through the campaign on easy (or hard) mode despite these saving troubles. It takes about an hour, and it’s not terribly exciting, save for one incredibly annoying portion against a boss named “Mucho Dolor”. Picture an Indiana Jones moment with the hero running away from a giant death trap (Mucho Dolor chasing you on a bulldozer), but with Indie’s awesome Harrison Ford Action Legs replaced with stumpy little Lego legs that are neither fast enough to run away in time, nor strong enough to jump over the obstacles that litter his path.
Long story short: you’re supposed to run away from Mucho Dolor while weaving through a maze of boxes, but since you can’t destroy or jump over the boxes, you end up losing one life (you start with eight or nine). Most every other part of the game can be completed without losing a drop of blood if you’re good enough, but Mucho Dolor is a pointless, and unavoidable beating that strips you of one of your precious lives. It was at this junction on my second playthrough that I decided I’d had enough of this title.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably gotten the gist of things, but just to be perfectly clear: Bob is not so much a guerrilla as he is a gorilla that monkeys with the formula of saved games, and makes a mockery of the time-honoured cigar-smoking badass. It’s no wonder John Gore hates him. I don’t like him much myself.
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Guerilla Bob is available for $2.99 on the App Store, but I bought it for $0.99 while it was on sale a while back.
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TAGS: action, dual stick shooter
