Review: Garters & Ghouls
January 19, 2010
The Overview
Though we are a couple of months past Halloween, Ghouls are always a great gaming topic and, of course, Garters never go out of style. Put them together and you have Namco's Garters & Ghouls. G&G is set in a Steampunk styled Victorian era. You play the freshly reanimated Marie Dupois tasked by Professor Barton to fight the evil Thrum and to attempt to save the life of your husband.
G&G uses the same twin stick controls as its nearest relatives in the App Store, Minigore and iDracula. The biggest difference between G&G and the other games is that G&G is not just a survival shooter, though it does have the option to play in that mode. In each level, you have to clear out all the monsters and their spawn points before being allowed to move through the exit to the next level.
Otherwise, Garters & Ghouls follows the same formula: use the left stick to move, the right stick to shoot. Keep moving and keep firing. Grab power-ups to increase your life or your fire power. Kill off certain types of enemies without getting injured and earn achievements.
The Features
G&G features the same type of twin stick controls as Minigore and iDracula though not as good as MiniGore's and much better than iDracula's. The game gives you two modes of play: Survival and Adventure.
Survival is just like iDracula's or Minigore's game-play - non-stop carnage until you die.
Adventure mode plays out the story of Marie's battle against the Thrum. This allows you to play through levels with clear cut goals, namely, destroy all the spawn points and monsters. You also get to stop in the upgrade shop and beef up Marie.
G&G also features 3 profile slots to save multiple players games.
The Breakdown
The Good
Though not the best or most original storyline, Garters & Ghouls does have a story - unlike Minigore or iDracula.
It features plenty of re-playability by playing through in Survival Mode (basically you are playing iDracula or MiniGore). Not to mention, with six pages of achievements, you will definitely need to play the game through more than once to get them all.
The Bad
Using the Profiles can be a bit confusing. You have to go into the Profiles sub-menu before starting a game, whereas most games will either ask you to choose your profile upfront or as soon as you start the game. Though you can re-play the Adventure Mode, it gets a bit repetitive...but that is fairly typical of the genre.
The twin sticks are not the best. For a game that requires constant moving and firing, the number of mis-steps and mis-fires caused by the wonky controls is unacceptable. Even on the most difficult setting, the game is not that difficult. With tons of power-ups and plenty of bullets, there is very little need to conserve ammo.
The Verdict
Garters & Ghouls is definitely a game worth getting if you are a fan of the twin stick shooter genre. With its story and tons of achievements, it offers up plenty of play value. It probably won't put up a real challenge to a hardcore gamer, but it should provide quite a bit of fun.