I walk through the long corridors with my gun ready for anything. Why am I here? Its my first day. I walk up to a door that opens automatically and there are enemies. They turn to face me and raise their guns. I manage to jump out of the way but bullet fly towards me. I try think of a plan but an enemy appears to the right of me and shoots.
In this installment of the Sword Art Online series you are in the world of Gun Gale Online. It is a dystopian future where guns are your primary weapons. It has a good balance of action and story throughout the entire game. However, The beginning starts out quite slow with a 10-15 minute action tutorial and then 40-50 minute story and mechanics introduction.
The difficulty that I had was that the dialogue was all in Japanese and it had written arts in English. This wouldn’t be too bad but sometimes the characters will talk to you mid battle so you have to look at the side of the screen to see what they have said.
I really liked that you can have a full team quite early and a good selection of characters to choose from. There are six roles that each character will fit into and one character who can switch between any role. I really liked this because you can make the team that you want and fit it to your play style.
There are two characters you can design so you can make your team even more unique. There are lots of design options for the characters ranging from over 35 hair styles to different eye colours. You can also unlock clothing options throughout the game and a lot of them look amazing and worth working towards.
There are a lot of gun options available as well which make it quite refreshing to see the same type of weapon with different statistics and boosts. I really like all these design and statistic elements to the game because you can really tailor your team to your play style.
The fighting style is very easy to get used to and the enemies are very fun to fight against. Some enemies have their own challenges when you are fighting them like there are some that have more resistance to damage so take a lot more to kill them. There are some that have really strong attacks so you have to dodge.
The design of the main area was very good and looked quite modern. Whereas, in the monster areas it was very basic design and felt very old but it didn’t take away much from the overall feel of the game.
Overall I really enjoyed playing Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as I was hoping for a more sword based game like they had in the anime. However, I really enjoyed the levelling system and the range of characters. The amount of guns and different boosts you can get made it a truly unique play through.
GameCritUK 