Aiming To Please
Gal Gun: Double Peace is a game that should be played along with friends, but only if these friends won’t judge you for playing a game where you must make high school girls orgasm by shooting euphoria at them from a gun. It’s for this reason that my editor-in-chief, Francis DiPersio, and I decided to tag-team this off-the-rails (that’s what I’d like to think of this as) rail shooter head-on and force as many Japanese girls into ecstasy as possible.
In Gal Gun: DP you play as Hodai, a boring high school boy who is the average run-of-the-mill teen who most girls wouldn’t even give a glance. Lucky (or unlucky depending on how you view this) for him he has been shot by a supercharged cupid’s arrow, if you will, by the angel of love Ekoro. Hodai is now irresistible to any girl who crosses his path as they will literally stop in their tracks, screeching tire sound and all, to get a piece of him. This sounds like a teenage boys dream, but unfortunately for Hodai, Ekoro alerts him that she didn’t mean to supercharge the arrow and a side effect is that he will be forever alone if unable to find his true love by sundown. This game made me ponder the question, “Will you give up true love for a single day of having every girl in the world want to have sex with you?”
Gal Gun: DP is an extremely addicting game that can be completed in about three hours. Now, three hours may seem short, but for this kind of game it’s actually perfect. It begs you to complete its campaign multiple times due to its many alternate paths and endings. The gameplay is actually surprisingly deep for an arcade-style rail shooter. Hodai is equipped with a gun that shoots pheromone bullets at his oncoming sex-crazed classmates and puts them into a complete convulsing orgasmic state. Each girl has a specific spot on their body that can be shot to send them into a quick ecstasy, making portions of the game where multiple girls are on screen at once a bit easier to handle. It never gets old watching these girls stumble over each other to get to you with these big anime smiles, only to be left on their knees out of breath as they moan some unknown ramblings. The only portions of the game that are subtitled are the cut scenes, which leave the in-game screaming schoolgirl’s vocabulary completely foreign to gamers that are unfamiliar with the Japanese language. I didn’t find this frustrating at all and it actually made my enjoyment of the game even greater.
One thing that adds to the basic gun gameplay is a charged shot that can be achieved by holding down the fire button until a large heart replaces the normal shot reticle. Unleashing this shot will make your area of fire significantly larger. A charged up shot can also be used to send girls into ecstasy a lot faster, as well as stagger any hapless teens caught in the shot’s blast radius. Along with the charge shot Hodai has a Doki-Doki meter that can be filled with each girl dispatched. Once it’s filled the triangle button can be pressed to send you into a mini-game called Doki-Doki mode. The camera will rotate a girl slowly and it’s up to you to find her sweet spot. It’s here that you will see and feel the difference between this and the PS4 game.
On the Vita front, Gal Gun: Double Peace delivers all of the sweaty-palmed excitement you’d expect from the pheromone-flinging rail shooter, but this portable perversion comes with a bit of a price. While the PS4 version of the game runs at a silky smooth pace, the Vita’s limited horsepower often causes the game’s frame rate to dip considerably during encounters that involve more than a couple of hormonal harassers. These performance issues plague every stage, and can make lining up precision shots from your love-launcher a little more difficult than it should be. Even still, after awhile you get used to the game’s frame drops, it’s just a shame the game wasn’t a bit more optimized for lovers on the go.
Don’t say goodbye to romance just yet though, as the Vita version’s portable paramour does do a few things the console version lacks. The most notable of these differences is how the Doki-Doki Mode minigame is handled. Namely, the Vita version trades in the PS4 version’s touch-pad-diddling deviations for some hot and heavy touchscreen action, requiring the player to rub, prod, and caress their virtual on-screen harem to achieve screen-clearing explosions of ecstasy. If the thought of using the PS4’s touch-pad to turn schoolgirls into orgasmic atom bombs makes you more than a little uncomfortable, the Vita version’s sicky-fingered antics certainly won’t be for you. However, those who know what they’re getting into will likely find the Vita version of Double Peace flagrant fan service to be all the more reason to add the game to their library, tucked safely under their mattress next to their vast reserves Kleenex and Lubriderm (we promise, we won’t judge you).
For those who own both a PS4 and Vita, it’s worth noting that Inti Creates has provided Cross-Save support for the game, making it easy to experience the best of both worlds. When all is said and done, the PS4 version’s sharper visuals and smoother frame rate are without a doubt to its benefit, the Vita version is still very playable, making the game’s console-specific features the biggest point of contention between the two versions of the game.
In terms of extras and bonus content, Gal Gun: Double Peace quite literally aims to please. As you progress through the story you’ll come across branching paths to explore new areas of each level. Additionally, at certain chapters in the story you’ll be able to choose from a handful of stages to progress to, significantly adding to the game’s replayability, as you’ll want to explore every naughty nook and cranny of this pervy package. You’ll even be able to take on requests from characters via a message board, allowing you to net money than you can spend in the in-game shop to unlock new items including health and shot-boosting power-ups, added cameras for Doki-Doki, mode, and more. Lastly, you’ll also be able to increase your stats depending on how you perform in each stage, which unlocks more dialog options to further expand the story and your romantic options for each playthrough. Simply put, there’s plenty of reason to keep coming back for more risque rail shooting action.
Many would claim that this shouldn’t be played by anyone other than the Japanese gamers it was originally intended for. However, with the wealth of brilliantly bizarre content making its way to the west these days, I honestly believe Gal Gun: Double Peace is a unique and engaging shooter that any any fan of the genre should appreciate, so long as you don’t mind loads of cheeky fan service. If your’e looking for a pervy experience with a nice amount of ingenuity, I’d not be doing my job if I didn’t recommend adding Gal Gun: Double Peace to your PS4 or Vita library.
Final Verdict: 4/5
Available on: PS4, Vita (reviewed) ; Publisher: PQube Games ; Developer: Inti Creates ; Players: 1 ; Released: August 2, 2016 ; MSRP: $39.99 (Vita) $59.99 (PS4)
Full disclosure: This review is based on PS4 and Vita versions of Gal Gun: Double Peace provided to HeyPoorPlayer by the publisher.
