Guns, Gore, and Cannoli

Sometimes I am just not sure what to play, when this happens I inevitably see what's on offer on the PlayStation Store (Steam has way too much on offer).  On one of these recent occasions, I came across a fun comic style action adventure shooter called Guns, Gore, and Cannoli.  It sounded and looked like my kind of fun so I thought why not give it a go.


Cannoli are crispy Italian pastries filled with sugary goodness.  I like them but I just realised while typing this I would probably like them more with coffee roll on Sunday.  They are crispy and really sweet which may not be everyone, but they do it for me.  Playing Guns, Gore, and Cannoli I found myself asking, do I really like cannoli?

Story


The story is about an enforcer for the Bellucci family called Vinnie Cannoli.  The game is set in the 1920's during the time of prohibition, in a delightful place called Thugtown. Vinnie has just pulled into Thugtown only to find it overrun with zombies, unfazed by this he decides to finish his job, find Frankie.


The story is fun and there is lots of cheesy dialogue and some fun catchphrases, my favorites being, 'Napoleon Blown-Apart' after...well blowing apart an enemy and 'He had more brains than I thought," after shooting someone in the head.  The only drawback as such was that the subtitles never seemed to match the dialogue.

Visuals


The visuals used in the game are a fun comic book style which I really liked.  Everything has a slightly over-exaggerated feel which works really well with the kind of game Guns, Gore, and Cannoli is.  One of my favorite enemies at least in terms of the design was the Leprechaun zombies, they float around on balloons throwing bombs and shouting gibberish. 


Overall a visually fun game that I never get tired of looking at.



Music



The score has a swinging twenties sound and like with everything else in the game works really well.  The music is composed by Belgium composer Matthias Claeys who has also worked on the music for Empire, Siegebreaker, and Coin Army.


The score runs a little over twenty minutes and is just the right length (hehe), my favorite tracks include, 'When Cannolies Come Marching Home', 'Top of The Bellucci State', 'The Overwhelmed Way to Zeppelins', and 'Thugtown Edge'.


Overall a short but fun soundtrack that works well with the game.

Gameplay


Onto the Cannoli, I mean meat.  With an army of zombies and wise guys, you're going to need guns, lots of guns.  There are quite a few weapons to choose from which unlock at a steady pace, my favorite one being the Tommy Gun.  My complaints with the guns are that almost all of them reload really slowly, which did impact my experience.  While you do have lots of guns you also have Molotov cocktails and turning enemies into bacon was always fun.


There are a lot of different enemies, all varying in difficulty, but for me, there was one enemy that really stood out from the rest - the football player zombie.  No matter what weapon I had equipped he always managed to send me flying.


I had two rather larger issues with the gameplay, the first was stairs, getting up them was often a complicated task.  The game for some reason just didn't recognise them all the time and did cause problems on more than one occasion.  The biggest problem I had was that you could not shoot up!  Between some of the floating enemies and the final boss, this was a real a pain.


Overall it had some great gameplay which could have been improved by some relatively minor changes.




Final Thoughts

So, after six or so hours how did I feel?  Pretty good, I had a lot of fun, the story, music, and visuals were good but the gameplay suffered from a few annoying issues.  I want to give a big shout to Nolls who helped me enjoy this experience by playing it in co-op with me - thanks Nolls!  Right, back to it, this one gets a solid 3 out of  5