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Reviewed On: PS5
Also Available On: Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC
Price: Digital – $21.99 USD / Physical – $29.99 PS5 or $34.99 Switch
Developer: Angry Demon Studio
Publisher: Wired Productions
Release Date: Digital – August 29th, 2024 / Physical – October 29th, 2024
Please Note: A review code was provided by Wired Productions for this review but does not influence the opinions stated here.
2024 has continued to have so many video game releases that have come out, especially in the later half of the year. There were eight (yes, 8!) games that released on August 29th, 2024 (and these are just the ones I knew about, probably even more that I didn’t). One of these titles was Gori: Cuddly Carnage from Angry Demon Studio and Wired Productions. The game was first revealed during 2020 with an initial trailer that looked a tad bit rough around the edges and then went quiet for a while. It resurfaced in 2022 with a brand new trailer where it looked so much better and I have been anticipating the game ever since. I was excited for the game and after playing the demo on Steam earlier this year my anticipation grew! So… did the full game live up what I was expecting or was I let down by the whole experience? Well, read my review and find out!
Myself, and a lot of people I knew growing up, wanted to own animals at one point or another. Well in this game, the Cool-Toyz Inc. created something called the Ultra Pets. Gori is one of those creations that was smuggled out before the destruction of them, as Gori was considered defective and too dangerous for children but his creator didn’t want to destroy him. Unfortunately, something massive happened where the unicorn toys turned evil and morphed into the Adorable Army, who was hell bent on destroying humanity. You play as Gori throughout the game working with your pals CHI-P, an AI, and F.R.A.N.K., a deadly hoverboard, to stop the unicorns and save your creator! There are some interesting plot moments and the ending really makes you see the light of what occurred, but overall it was a pretty good story.
So, when you are trying to think of adorable, a big thing kids think of is unicorns. Thankfully in this game, they have become infected and are there to be killed. They want to kill you too, so don’t feel bad about hurting them first. In the levels, you have to get to the exit by jumping around and on obstacles, outpacing chase sequences, finding different paths, and also being able to kill enemies. Killing them is easy since you have the physical attacks, a ranged attack, a shield, and more to work with. You are scored at the end of the levels, so just keep killing and don’t get hit to get your combo up and you will get some great scores!
The enemies are not just a basic unicorn, rather there are some ranged focused ones, hand-like creatures, flying ones, magical ones, and more. Each level, excluding the final one, adds at least one new type of enemy to the mix which keeps you on your toes so the gameplay doesn’t ever feel too stale or repetitive. There are a good variety of enemies, but then you also have the generals (a.k.a. the bosses at the end of each level in the game) of the army. I loved their designs and gameplay mechanics as they each were unique and had you think a bit more on your toes than the normal run of the mill enemy!
So the gameplay is pretty basic in concept as a hack and slash action platformer; however, there are loads of other things to do in the game. There may only be eight worlds in the game, but the game wants you to play through each more than just once in order to get all of the gold stars! There is a star to get a good time, a star for total score, a star for top combo, and a star for playing on the set difficulty. I usually could get top score and combo easily in the level, and then went back to get the ones for difficulty and time if I needed (sometimes, that was easy to get right away too). For me, two playthroughs of each level were enough to get all the gold stars available. On top of the main level, there are 14 side challenge levels that test different things from combo score, your speed run ability, don’t take damage, and more. Each of these side challenges has an uninfected unicorn that you need to rescue in order to get the true ending of the game, which mostly wasn’t too hard to complete.
There is a main ship where it acts as your hub world after each level in the game. Here you can explore side rooms if you find the three key parts in the connected level, with each having a theme connected to the world you were in; plus a cool outfit for Gori as a bonus! The three key pieces are pretty easy to find if you keep your gaming instincts turned on. On top of this, in the hub world’s door one, and throughout the different levels, there are upgrade booths to unlock bigger health and energy bars, more rockets, stronger attacks and a better shield, and more to help conquer the army. You can also unlock different fur and eye colors for Gori and F.R.A.N.K., and more photo mode filters! Yes, the game does have photo mode, that I personally used only a few times, but is cool for those that like taking in-game pictures! There are some more things in the game, but I don’t want to spoil everything!
I never expected to fall in love with the voice acting in this game, but I did. I thought the voices of F.R.A.N.K., CHI-P, and the rest of the cast of enemies and friends were very good as a whole. From the story segments at the beginning of each world to the quips and short dialogue moments in the levels, I just loved the chemistry between them all in how they work with each other. One of my favorites in the whole game is the manager boss during world 3, that delivery of those specific lines cracked me up when I had to play that level multiple times! The rest of the audio in the game is overall good from the music in the levels to the sounds of hacking apart loads of enemies. Saying that though, in all honesty nothing is all that extremely memorable to me besides the theme of the game in the main menu, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.
The performance of the game was pretty solid for the most part throughout the title, with frame rate dips hitting on occasion while playing on performance mode. It mostly happened when there was a lot of enemies on the screen at once. In terms of the visuals in the game, the colors are eye catching and vibrant from the different cast of characters to the multiple worlds that the game has you explore, to all of the enemies and blood that you will see in the game. The fact the game is one where the human race has been destroyed and there is just destruction around every corner, it actually still has the feeling where the world is actually alive thanks to the colors and artistic style the game is in. The game is stunning to look at where it may not have AAA levels of detail, but it sometimes has that feeling of it being close to that level.
Honestly, I give indies more of a pass for issues or bugs than I do for AAA games because their budgets aren’t as high as AAA games are, but there is quite a few bugs in this game where it does hurt it a tad bit. Over my 12 hours of getting the platinum trophy, I had 3 crashes in the game. One of them was so bad, that it happened right after I beat the final boss in the game and I got a message saying my data was corrupted! Thankfully, PS+ save data wasn’t automatically uploaded to the cloud for me, so I got my data off the cloud that it had synced previously and only had to do the last two worlds again. It definitely freaked me out as I didn’t want to have to do everything all over again, and was the first game this has happened to me on PS5 regarding data corruption.
On top of this, there are other bugs and glitches that did plague the entire game for me. One of the big ones that I got was where Gori would no longer jump, which is a big problem where there was a lot of enemies trying to hit you. If you reload the checkpoint, that fixed the issue for me; however, it meant redoing a part of the level you just did. A second issue is when I was trying to complete a level, I loaded into a room where I knew enemies were supposed to spawn, and none ever did. I tried reloading the checkpoint to see if it would be fixed, and it didn’t work. I had to exit the level and redo all of it again, and this didn’t happen just once… it happened in multiple worlds and areas.
Yet another issue for me, was once I got all of the gold stars, I thought the final trophy would pop to collect all gold stars in the game… but it didn’t. To rectify this, I just loaded into one of the random challenges and completed it, and the trophy popped and I got my platinum, so not super bad, but a noticeable thing to watch for. A final big issue happened was during a boss fight where I went to shoot a rocket… and well it got stuck. The video of that bug is below, and it was annoying since I needed to restart the whole boss all over again! There were a couple of other bugs, but those are minor compared to these.
All in all for a game studio to change from doing first person horror games to a third person hack and slash game, I think they did a terrific job. I thought the story was good and the way it was told was different than just a normal cutscene of bright flashy effects rather a slower beat of a different visual effect was nice. I thought the main gameplay was engaging and not just a button mash of moves if you wanted to get great combos, good scores, and not die. I thought the art and visuals of the game were great and the voice acting was great, but the music and audio were not super memorable. Some of the levels were more annoying than others, but the variety is abundant. The bugs and glitches definitely took some of the enjoyment out of the game, which definitely knocked my score for Gori down a bit. Gori: Cuddly Carnage might be one of my favorites from this year when its all said and done, but there are still loads of games to play and left to release so I am not sure. Regardless, I cannot wait for my PS5 physical copy to come out in October, since I think the game deserves to have a lot of support, despite the bugs I encountered! It’s not purrfect, but it is an overall strong landing from Angry Demon Studio!
Review Score: 7.5/10
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