Developer: Dapper Dog Digital
Publisher: Dapper Dog Digital
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Bio-Gun – Preview
Bio-Gun is a game that was originally released back in 2016 for browsers. Three years later, in December of 2019, Dapper Dog Digital decided to take that arcade game and convert it into a complete Metroidvania. That arcade game has been in development for a while, and we were lucky enough to take a closer look at the current demo. Today we present you with our opinion of this early build.
A new pet-demic has infested all pets around the world with the Dooper Virus. Luckily, there’s a cure: project Bio-Gun. In Bio-Gun you play as Bek, a vaccine created from pig DNA, on his mission to save his creator’s dog from the Dooper Virus. You travel through your dog’s body, talking to cells and destroying evil viruses to save your dog from the Dooper Virus.
The story is silly and while it isn’t really the most memorable, its carefree nature is perfect for this game. It’s filled with excessive puns, playful jokes, and absurd moments that altogether create the perfect laid-back atmosphere.
Bio-Gun features a beautiful hand-drawn art style, which is often compared to Hollow Knight. Even though this comparison makes sense, Dapper Dog Digital seems to really focus on making the art in Bio-Gun unique and stand out from other games. Bio-Gun’s creator, John Rogeles, tries to focus more on a hand-drawn art style with a sort of cel-shading. Thanks to this, the game’s world pops more on screen.
The animations in this game are surprisingly fluent. From important movement abilities to silly animations while saving; everything looks and feels great. It is clear that a lot of effort went into small details, making this game’s visuals look perfect.
The soundtrack in this game definitely isn’t bad. Everything sounds nice, all areas have distinct songs and everything sounds great. The music supports the game, it adds to the atmosphere and makes you feel the tension of traveling with enemies able to attack you at all times. The soundtrack also adds to the atmosphere, motivating you to further explore the world by investigating every nook and cranny for hidden areas, bosses, etc. As a whole, Bio-Gun’s soundscape is fairly decent, it just isn’t memorable.
You are Bek, a vaccine that looks like a pig. Your mission is to travel through the body of your dog and battle the Dooper Virus. You start with a simple dash and gun, and you’ll have to fight your way through all kinds of organisms trying to stop you from saving your creator’s dog. There are multiple enemies and bosses for you to challenge. Some of these bosses are hidden and hard to find, while others are essential to progress through the game. After defeating certain bosses you unlock new movement abilities, allowing you to reach new areas that were previously inaccessible. This way the game provides a natural way of progressing through the game.
Speedrunning is already a big part of Bio-Gun. Even though the demo only has around two hours of gameplay, there are players that have spent over a hundred hours trying to optimize every second of their runs, finding weird ways to abuse the movement system to get advantages over other runners. There is for example a technique called the 1.5 jump. This technique consists of pressing the jump button multiple times in quick succession so you can make a small double jump. By timing this perfectly, you can barely get enough height to jump to areas that would usually require you to fight a boss and unlock their movement ability. This way you can skip parts of the game, saving you a lot of time. While some might see this as a huge negative, as you could see it as a game-breaking bug, we found this to be a good thing. The 1.5 jump is by itself not hard to perform, you can technically do it by just spamming the jump button. That being said, getting to new areas without movement abilities and just the 1.5 jump technique requires almost perfect timing which is really hard to execute consistently. It took us a while before we were able to get used to this skill to get to a new area for the first time, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to do it somewhat consistently. Therefore we argue that the 1.5 jump is a great thing for the game, as it is unlikely someone would use it to get to new areas on their first run, and therefore it does not hurt the new player experience at all. It is a hard-to-execute technique that adds depth to the game for the truly dedicated.
We believe speedrunning is an important aspect of games such as these, and the developers of Bio-Gun seem to share that view as they have hosted a speedrunning competition and seem to support the speedrunning community. That being said, this should not be the only challenging aspect of the game. We found Bio-Gun to lack challenging content, enemies have basic attack patterns, and while the bosses took us a few tries to beat, we can’t exactly call them challenging. Once you learn how to fight the boss, it becomes easy. Currently, the bosses in the game only require knowledge on how to beat them, without ever becoming complex in terms of mechanics.
Conclusion
After playing through the demo of Bio-Gun, we found that it has the potential to become a great game. It’s clear that the project is backed by a passionate development team that cares about their community. Thanks to this, a small dedicated community has already formed, which is a commendable feat considering the current build only has around two hours of gameplay. Even in this early build, everything looks great and even the sound design is of a certain quality. Everything seems to point in the right direction and we can’t wait to see what Dapper Dog Digital has in store for us when this game releases in 2023. For now, we really recommend you give their demo a try.
Bio-Gun - Preview,
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