Bio-Gun Demo Gameplay Preview

The demo for Bio-Gun showed a pretty polished metroidvania game about an armed vaccine (also a pig for some reason) being injected into the doctor’s dog in a last ditch effort to save it from the deadly Dooper virus. It brought to mind the old movie Osmosis Jones or that one episode of the Magic School Bus where they enter one of the student’s bodies.

I have to say, the game looks pretty darn gorgeous. The art style looks hand drawn and is beautifully animated. The game looks absolutely lovely in motion. There are plenty of colors used and the animation looks very fluid. The backing track sounds pretty good as well. It sounded very much like some of the tracks you would find in a classic Megaman game.

The game plays just as smooth as it looks and sounds. The controls are very simple but responsive. Bek can jump, shoot, and dash and has other abilities unlocked later as he defeats bosses and meets new characters. You unlock a hover ability after defeating the first boss and an exploding projectile attack after meeting an ally in the game.

As you shoot enemies, you fill up an energy meter that can either be used to heal yourself or power special attacks. You also collect small pink globules from defeated enemies to purchase upgrades such as a floating sentry that will shoot enemies for you. The upgrades come in the form of chips and they can be freely swapped out at save points. The pink globules go everywhere once an enemy is defeated so it was a tad annoying to run all over the place to pick them up. I would have preferred if they were just magnetically absorbed (my only nitpick with the demo).

The demo had a pretty large section of the game available. You can go explore much of the map. I definitely enjoyed running around exploring every nook and cranny. You sometimes ran into an area where you needed a specific upgrade to progress. One such area required you to obtain the hover ability in order to help a fellow organism cross a blocked off area by activating a bridge. A little bit of back tracking is inevitable but it didn’t feel tedious because there were plenty of fast travel points. The fast travel points are areas of the dog close enough to the skin for the doctor to extract Bek and then re-inject him into another place. Quite humorous.

Overall, the Bio-Gun demo shows a very polished game. It looks very pretty, the sound track is nostalgic, and the game play is very solid.