Review: Demons With Shotguns

These year-end holidays and the summer vacations (at least here in the southern hemisphere) are a perfect opportunity to gather some friends at home and have some good-and-old gaming afternoons. Or mornings. Or nights. You got the idea. And for those special moments with friends, Demons with Shotguns is a great opportunity for you.

Developed by US studio MindShaft Games and published by Digerati, Demons with Shotguns is a hellish and frantic couch-multiplayer 2D battle arena where you and up to three friends will fight until death using deadly shotguns to eliminate one another! Choose your favorite character from 6 scary figures and enter 40 different arenas full of traps and different and frightening players will battle for surviving against each other.

What do you do? In Demons with Shotguns, you fight against demons and other hellish creatures – or your friends – in 2D arenas. As simple as this. Avoid traps and enemy attacks with double-jumps, dashes and a lot of agility and dispatch them with your shotgun, painting the levels in blood-red.

What we liked!

• Gameplay: The gameplay in Demons with Shotguns is very straight forward: kill everything that moves before they kill you! To do so, you will use your Shotguns and holy water vials that work as grenades. You can double-jump, dash and use a shield to block incoming attacks from your fouls. You can also pick up tarot cards with different effects that work as power-ups to dominate the battlefield. When you defeat an enemy, his soul will be floating where he died. When in End of Times mode, remember to collect them and take them to the demon head at the center of the stage to pick some extra lives… you will definitely need them!
• Bloody visuals: Be prepared for some charming pixel art graphics with a good amount of blood and violence. The characters become tiny in some levels of the game, making it hard to see the good level of details on them. But trust me: they are there. The scenarios are also well detailed and have some interesting animation, like for instance the helicopter that is recording the action in the Water Tower Terror level. Just remember that the visuals are very gory, with a bloodbath at every death. Be warned: this isn’t a child-friendly game!
• Hellish audio: The chiptune soundtrack of Demons with Shotguns does a very good job to enhance its retro feeling. Its sound effects are good too, with great emphasis on the sound of your shotgun – the blast you are going to hear the most in this game. The explosions of your holy water vials do a very good job as well.
• Game modes: The game is clearly focused on its multiplayer modes, where up to four friends will battle in 40 different levels of hellish action. Game modes include the classic deathmatch and team deathmatches and some variation of other common multiplayer game modes like capture the soul and long of the soul. If you’re short on friends to play with, there’s also the End of Times: a mode for up to two players where you will fight waves of enemies in four different levels plus a final challenge/boss at the end.

Somewhere between

• Multiplayer only? Although there’s a single-player mode, most of the fun of the game will be in the multiplayer mode. And if you don’t have friends who can play with you in your home – since it’s a local co-op only – you won’t be able to enjoy half of the game. We love couch multiplayer games, but MindShaft Games could have added bots to this mode to solve this problem. Who knows, maybe in a future update.

What we disliked

• Don’t touch me: During the heat of the battle, it’s hard to avoid touching your enemies. What’s the problem with it? Well, most of your enemies will kill you by the contact. So, try at any cost to avoid contact with your enemy. It will save you from many moments of rage.
• Story? What for? Yes, Demons with Shotguns is a game focused on multiplayer clashes. But there’s no information regarding the End of Times mode or what to this world. Is this the end of the world? The Armageddon? Apocalypse? Or just a Halloween party? I have no idea and both the page on the Xbox store and developer’s page don’t give us any clue.

Demons with Shotguns is a great option for those gaming nights with friends. It’s a frantic and bloody local multiplayer full of action that will have you and your friends fighting to explode each other with a well-aimed shotgun shot. Creepy, I know, but totally understandable once you see the bloodfest this game is. It may not be a game for all ages, but if you enjoy a good arena battle with friends, this is a great name to have in your library.