GunGrave OD's stylish, simple, cool, and fun even if it's a bit simple or maybe just broken on its own merit. Somehow...
Graphics look like straight out from a DC game, still look awesome and more than enough for a cartoony looking game. Even makes it look more confortable cause it looks like you're playing this game from this time and age where Anime was like this. Right colors, right mood, plenty of cool animations and things getting shredded all over the place while you hammer on the square button.
Sounds like a broken radio and it sounds right. Most of the time there's no music and when there is it's always awesome. In game just having you pushing the square button repetitively will result in a huge sound blast with the proper feedback from the dual shock. Voices and the like are all recorded like they were underwater or some low bit rate and that's just cool. Most of the enemies in game only say two things which are "IKE!" and "KSOU!" (come on! and **** just to let you know they've spotted you. Their screams of agony are as repetitive as addictive like in Streets of Rage. After you kill someone you'll always expect to hear that scream and you'll want to kill them to hear that 16 bit scream. It's awesome.
Story
is pretty cool and surprisingly surprising. Even if it is a simple infantile premise like "lets go to enemy HQ and kill everyone on sight" it does get a bit more complicated that that (not that much complicated tho) and the characters even if a bit cliche are quite memorable. Grave doesn't say a friggin word the whole game actually but it makes him kinda funny. It's like watching a 10 hour anime.
Controls
just right, you've got square for fire, x for evasive moves, circle for melee attacks and defense and triangle for a enemy cleaning, crowd pleasing, stylish wiping backup attack when things get too hectic. Just like when you had to call the cops in Streets of Rage. There's 9 of these for each character to unlock and there are 3 characters. You've even got a button to strike a pose when you want to or find it cool to build up on the artistic gauge. It's just to show off but I actually used it a lot of times after killing hundreds of hitmen. Plays
like you were some kind of undead robocop or terminator. In these type of games normally there's some emphasis on dodging bullets or taking cover (or at least there should be), but well, Gungrave OD it's not that type of game. It's just shoot em before they shoot you and keep moving forward. And there's not any sort of cover to be found. Now you might ask how do you get past the levels without getting shot. Simple. You don't. And that's where Gg OD succeeds. You just fire away without any care in the world, have your time blasting everything to shreds(cause everything can be destroyed in this game) and building up combo while you do it with style cause it's almost impossible to lose in this game. You see, it uses the same system as Halo where you have your health and this shield that regenerates when you stand still. After all you're playing with a dead gunslinger inspired from Desperado for all that matters. And that single thing explains it all for you. You're DEAD so you cannot die. Have fun. Of course that it's like in Halo, bullets fly around everywhere and you're always getting hit - Unless... you mow em down first cause they're not that intelligent and they normally just stand still and this applies for the rest of the game. In Halo they fire a hundred flying heat seeking bullets at you, and then, they run for cover and hide. How irritating. Plus, in Halo you don't have this type of visceral thrills which give pavement for fun and scrap any kind of tactics involved. Like halo, the enemy variety is very limited. There's like 4 different types of behavior and the rest it's purely cosmetic. And they're all pretty dumb. For starters there's the common mob which normally stands still while shooting, then there's these guys with swords who run at you, surround you and deflect your bullets, guys with shields and rockets which you can deflect back with your coffin, and these huge dumb guys who stand still but need more than a few bullets to bite the dust. And that's it. Later on there's choppers and a few variations but mostly they all do the same. There's lots of bosses and sometimes you can get outnumbered for real. This is when the game starts to break but some insistence should take care of that. It's just that at the end it begins to become more and more like a survival game where you have to manage your health, shield and demolition shots well. And though I think this is a game to play in short bursts you could also end it in a night though you might grow weary of the same overpowered gameplay tactics the game has to offer. Still everytime you load it up after sometime it's always fun and it has a decent variety of unlockable goodies in sake of replay value. All in all it could use a bit more polish and if it had, say, the same polish of a game like Max Payne 2 this could really be something else but it's fun as it is and there's a roughness to this game and the ways it uses to overcome such rough spots without even touching them that is something worth playing.