{"id":8543,"date":"2017-12-22T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/guns_gore_and_cannoli"},"modified":"2017-12-22T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T15:00:00","slug":"review-guns-gore-cannoli-switch-eshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2017\/12\/22\/review-guns-gore-cannoli-switch-eshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli (Switch eShop)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"\">\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Screenshot 1 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87049\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87049\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Cannoli 2\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>How do you make the well-worn platform shooter genre feel fresh and exciting? Our answer wouldn&#8217;t necessarily be to mash together equally well-worn zombie and gangster tropes, but that&#8217;s what the developer of <strong><a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/guns_gore_and_cannoli\">Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli<\/a><\/strong> has come up with.<\/p>\n<p>The game casts you as Vinnie Cannoli, a prohibition-era mob enforcer who&#8217;s equal parts James Cagney, Silvio Dante and Fat Tony D&#8217;Amico. In other words, he&#8217;s a walking Mafioso clich\u00e9. Faced with the kind of alcohol-induced zombie apocalypse you only usually see in provincial English towns on a Friday night, Vinnie sets off to do what he does best &#8211; shoot lots of stuff. There is more to the plot, but to be honest we&#8217;ve already forgotten what it is.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Screenshot 2 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87050\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87050\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Cannoli 3\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>All that matters is that you understand the concept of running right, clambering over obstacles, and blasting anything that moves. It&#8217;s a formula that will be familiar to anyone who&#8217;s ever played a Metal Slug game. Your initial target is the undead, who come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There are zombie cops who unleash random shots from their sidearms, burly gridiron players who steamroll right through you, and whip-wielding exotic dancers who, well, wield whips.<\/p>\n<p>After a few levels you&#8217;ll start to face human opposition, who are a little smarter and thus more interesting to face. These goons take cover, shoot back, lob grenades and generally force you to fight more cautiously. The game&#8217;s guns pack quite a punch. You&#8217;ll steadily amass an armoury of weapons, including pistols, shotguns, machine guns and flamethrowers. Firing these is bound to ZR, with R set to reloading. Over on the LR and L buttons you have your grenades and Molotov cocktails, which become essential when flushing out cowering mobsters and soldiers.<\/p>\n<p>In Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli&#8217;s favour, it constantly forces you to switch between weapons on the fly &#8211; whether due to an empty clip (reloads take a while) or the nature of the threat in front of you. The twin-barrelled shotgun has great stopping power, for example, but won&#8217;t be of much use when the clapper-board zombie shuffles along. You&#8217;re better off switching to a pistol and going for a headshot.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Screenshot 3 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87047\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87047\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Cannoli 1\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>For all its visceral attributes, it&#8217;s odd that the combat starts to feel so samey so quickly. Running right and blasting stuff simply becomes a bit of a chore before too long, and we found that we play the game in brief bursts as a result. Perhaps it&#8217;s down to the crudeness of the combat. While there&#8217;s a certain satisfaction to popping zombie heads, encounters all tend to smoosh together with a similar tone and pace.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Fights take place on a single plane and at the same time close to medium distance. You can aim left and right, but not up and down or diagonally. You&#8217;ll often need to physically stand higher than your target (on a staircase or a box, say) to score a reliable headshot. On the plus side, the graphics are sharp and expressive, with a cartoony art style that does its best to sell the whole &#8216;gangster zombie&#8217; premise. It all looks really slick and stylish, even on Switch&#8217;s compact display.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a shame the same can&#8217;t be said for game&#8217;s writing and characterisation, which is universally shallow and frequently unpleasant. We find ourselves wishing to mute Vinnie&#8217;s repetitive, casually psychotic chuntering from a very early point in the game. It&#8217;s neither witty nor funny. Perhaps the best way to play the game is with the volume turned down or off, and with four players contributing their own boisterous soundtrack.\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Screenshot 4 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87052\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/87052\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Cannoli 5\" \/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve got the control pads to spare, Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli is just the kind of brainless, instantly gratifying nonsense that could well spice up a multiplayer gaming session &#8211; in between extended bouts of something more substantial. Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli is a solid shooter with slick graphics and crunchy combat, but it&#8217;s a little too crass and one note for its own good. Like the titular pastry, it really needs to be consumed in moderation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli is a reasonably proficient side-scrolling shooter that grows somewhat tiresome through repetitive combat and unpleasantly clich\u00e9d\u00a0character design. It&#8217;s an enjoyably brainless diversion &#8211; especially in multiplayer &#8211; but it&#8217;s one that only really works in small doses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do you make the well-worn platform shooter genre feel fresh and exciting? Our answer wouldn&#8217;t necessarily be to mash together equally well-worn zombie and gangster tropes, but that&#8217;s what the developer of Guns, Gore &amp; Cannoli has come up with. The game casts you as Vinnie Cannoli, a prohibition-era mob enforcer who&#8217;s equal parts [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}