So you read our Gunhead review and you’ve decided to take the plunge, or maybe you just wandered in from Google? Either way, you’re here because you are after a bit of help getting started with this highly engaging roguelite shooter.
It can be a bit difficult to work out how everything fits together, as you’re left alone to grapple with the game’s systems for the most part. There is a short introduction to the game on the start menu and you should obviously give this a good look, even if it doesn’t make sense at first.
Gunhead is the kind of game that rewards experimentation, and with a plethora of weapons and items to discover and then unlock, it can be a bit daunting at first. Hopefully, if that’s the case for you, this beginner’s guide will be the helping hand you need to get going.
Begunner Tips
In your base of operations – a spaceship that warps around the galaxy in search loot at the behest of your corporate overlords – you have a number of crewmates. Each of them fulfils a function, so it’s worth getting to know them properly before you get too far into the game.
For starters, you can tweak the difficulty at the front of the ship. A nice touch is that you can see how each setting affects the overall damage stats. Naturally, as a roguelite, a bit of challenge is part of the fun, but you can put the difficulty down to “easy” and have a slightly more relaxed time with toughened skin and increased damage output – things will still get challenging before the end.
There’s also a terminal for keeping track of your various unlocks, and you will probably spend a bit of time here during every run. It’s here that you spend the money you’ve earned during missions on items that you can then pick up for future attempts. Speaking of which, before you start a full run, you can also pick from a selection of different mech suits.
Gunhead and friends
There are several different variations of mech suit to unlock, but you can only change suit at the start of a new run. Pick wisely, then, as you can’t change your suit until you’re pushing up digital daisies.
The standard suit is absolutely the one we’d recommend that you stick with at the beginning. This well-rounded suit offers a good balance between health and mobility. It has got a limited jetpack, but it’s more than enough to get you up into the air and out of any trouble. Similarly, exploration is fairly straightforward with the Gunhead suit equipped.
However, you might be feeling a bit saucy and decide to change things up and try out one or two of the other suits. Be warned, though, as they change everything. It’s definitely easy to get around the place in the Gunhead, but that’s even more so the case in the Archangel suit, which has an infinite jetpack. It’s a bit squishier, though, so you’re taking your chances.
The real game changer was Rook, which looks a little bit like Master Chief and can quintuple jump about the place like a bouncing bunny of destruction. You’ve got a bit of extra health at the expense of the mobility of a proper jetpack. It works, though, as the level design has been built to facilitate this playstyle, even if it does slow the pace down a bit overall.
Plan your planning
The strategic element of Gunhead means that just turning up and shooting things isn’t advised at all. Once you get past the first couple of wrecks, the procedural level generation starts to spit out some really challenging missions.
The first thing you need to do is properly familiarise yourself with the map legend and the terminology. There are symbols for everything and you’ll need to know what you’re looking at on the planning map, as many of the systems are interlinking and must be considered together as a whole and not individually.
One example that caught me out – despite a warning from a shipmate – was the Nuke system. When active, this security system means you get a small nuclear blast when any other system is destroyed. You’ve got to take the Nuke defence system out first, but then maybe there’s a Shield protecting the device in a different part of the ship. You’re going to have to unpick the challenge one system at a time.
Luckily, everything you can see on the planning map, you can also see in your mini-map, albeit with a more restricted view. You should be constantly referring to this mini-map, especially when you’re playing a level with signal jammers or systems that teleport between different rooms – keep track of your objective as it’s easy to get distracted.
Combat time
Once you’ve checked your map thoroughly, it’s time to head to work. After you leave the safety of your ship you’ve got tremendous freedom when zooming about between vessels. There are entrances all over the place, some locked and some open, and you’ve got a fair degree of freedom to tackle the problem from whichever direction you prefer.
After you’ve picked your point of attack, it’s time to look lively. The enemies in Gunhead are dangerous and require vigilance. Luckily, you’re equipped with a strong melee option as standard, and you’re going to need it. Obviously, lunging at your opponents with a metal lance is an effective way of doing tremendous damage, but ideally you’ll be dispatching your foes before they got close enough for the melee option.
Not only are there enemies all over the place, patrolling the ship and looking out for you, but some systems will cause turrets to spawn near your location. This puts you under constant pressure, and it’s another system that we’d recommend taking down as soon as possible. Another well as the self healing Repair system, which does exactly what you think it does – take that one out early if you can.
Getting gooder
As you play you’ll improve naturally – one would like to think, but at my age that’s not always the case – but there are also ways that you can improve the odds for yourself. One if to make money by paying close attention to the side objectives for each mission. Some of them are very doable and the extra money will come in handy.
While there are often side objectives that incentivise you not to visit a health station during a mission, I pretty much always ignored this and made sure to visit every health terminal possible. They’re marked on your map with a little cross, and they’ll heal up a bit of damage. Make sure you’re fully healed before you attack the boss, because once they’re down the mission ends immediately.
Another thing you’ll find on your journey that you should definitely go out of your way to grab is the keycards. These access cards will help you get through locked doors and can potentially help you reach hard to access rooms quicker than you would through linear play.
A big part of the fun in Gunhead is the roster of weapons. There are loads on offer, and you’ll discover new ones as you play. Once you’ve found them in the game you’ll then be able to purchase them between missions from a terminal on your ship.
While it’s viable to make up each run as you go, equipping what you find mid-mission, a more deliberate player might instead use every bit of the money they’ve raised to equip specific weapons that they know are effective for them.
Once you’ve started to find interesting weapons, Gunhead opens up and you can deploy new tactics during battle. Flamethrowers, for example, are a great way of quickly burning through a AI Core to end a level quickly. However, you wouldn’t want to waste fuel on minions when you could easily dispatch most of them with a basic rifle and a lance attack or two.
Try and equip a nice balance of weapons – you’ve got four slots after all, and it’s worth considering what you’re going to put in them and how they work together across short and medium range.
Summing up
There is a lot going on in Gunhead, much more than you might think at first glance. Our main advice to anyone who is playing is to make sure don’t underestimate the strategy side of things. The more you think about your plan of action before you go, the quicker you’ll execute it – it’s as simple as that.
Gunhead is a game where you get out what you put in, so plan hard and fight harder, lest you disappoint your sinister corporate overlords. You wouldn’t want that now, would you?!
