Check out our Gunboat God Beginner’s Guide to get you started on the path to godliness proper!

Rejoice everyone, everywhere! Your new lord and saviour, Gunboat God is with us! The new title from developer Janson RAD has brought us a slick and well-polished shoot ’em up that is a whole lot of fun. We said as much in our review of the game.

We thought it might be useful to pull together a few hints and tips so you start quest to exact your revenge on the gods that have wronged you, in the right way. So if you truly desire to become a true Gunboat God, then read on!

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Get to Grips with Your Controls

Your gunboat is a dynamic and flexible vessel. Not only can it surf the water and dash forward, but you can also jump high, and dive below the water too. You’ll need to get to grips with controlling the boat and being able to jump and dive down to avoid obstacles or enemies.

There’s a really useful skill you can unlock called ‘Force’, it gives you greater control of your rise and fall. That means if you’ve jumped up into the air, you can continue to hold up to slow your descent, and vice versa, if you’re underwater and want to re-emerge more slowly you can do. You can also adjust how quickly you might land or rise too. It’s worth playing with to get a good feel for.

I would prioritise this skill and save your uranium rods from completing challenges to get this one. I believe it costs 4 rods.

Special Bar

You’ll be working with the two bars at the top left of your screen a lot. The special bar, the coloured one (it changes depending on which world you’re in) will increase the more kills you get. It drains fairly quickly, but killing more enemies or shooting hearts that can be found on some levels will top it up. You need to this to increase your gunboat’s speed, how high you can jump or dive, as well as how far you dash.

This bar’s fullness also determines the level at which your gun fires. It’ll fire more rapidly and with greater intensity the higher the bar is. So balancing your abilities versus your weapon and movement is something you’ll quickly need to get to grips with (though it’s not difficult, there’s loads of enemies to shoot at in most levels).

Beneath that is the red bar, this is how much use you can get from your abilities or special attack. Again, killing enemies fills this up and some levels will give you a boost for every kill so you can maintain an ability.

Abilities

There are four abilities that you find through the game. You’ll get them by naturally playing through the game’s levels and there are levels specifically designed to teach you how the abilities work.

• Jet – lets you turn the gunboat into a flying rocket that keeps your airborne.
• Submarine – turns you into a submarine for swimming underwater.
• Ghost – turns you into a ghost so you can pass through enemies or hazardous environments without taking damage.
• Shield – creates a deployable shield around you that can absorb damage from enemies / projectiles.

All the abilities can be upgraded using jewels that you get rewarded at the end of levels. There are four upgrades for each ability and they’re really useful. For example, the second upgrade for submarine adds a sonar that slows enemies down.

Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade!

You need to be visiting your gear screen on the regular. You head here to use the items you receive at the end of levels to upgrade your weapons, skills and abilities. Usually, at the end mission screen if you go to the cog on the left of the menu options, it will take you to the gear screen. If you miss this, you can press back from the map screen to take you to the main menu and select gear.

You get a lot of items to upgrade your stuff fairly regularly, so it’s worth to keep topping your weapons / boosts up. The first two items in the list of upgrades lets you juice up all your weapon’s general damage. This can go to level 80. Keeping on top of this is important, if enemies start to feel hench, go back and check your weapon level versus what the enemy level is. If the enemy level is higher, the game will warn you on the level select screen.

You can then use a different item to upgrade the individual weapons you find. Each has different attributes you can boost, usually two or three times. This varies depending on the weapon.

As mentioned previously, uranium rods you find by completing challenges are needed to unlock skills. The same with abilities, you’ll get jewels at the end of each level to upgrade them. The last upgrades are for your augments.

Augments

You’ll find augments as unlocks as you progress through the game’s levels. Augments add buffs to your gunboat when you’re playing in Dread Mode. Augments can be upgraded using nuggets that are awarded for completing levels in Dread Mode. There are five augments to find in the game.

• Spear – bullets pierce through enemies.
• Deep – deal more damage shooting directly up at enemies.
• Thorn – inflict more damage over time.
• Sky – deal more damage shooting directly down at enemies.
• Trident – chain damage to nearby enemies.

Dread Mode

So you think you’ve become a Gunboat God be defeating the five bosses on normal mode, huh? Well look out because Dread Mode is here and ready to turn it up to 11. Activating Dread Mode puts you in the ‘Atomic Dimension’. You can replay every level in the game with some new modifiers, and access to the aforementioned Augments.

Dread Mode makes it so:

• Your boat movement is faster.
• The protection time while your hurt is shorter.
• You take more damage.
• Energy drains fasters.
• Enemies are faster and have more health.
• Bosses use all their attacks.
• Missions will have a variety of modifiers.

If you’re an achievement / trophy hunter, there are rewards for completing all the levels on Dread Mode, thankfully you don’t need to get godly on Dread Mode for all the achievements / trophies, but hey, what sort of Gunboat God would you be if you didn’t go for that?

Godly Ranks

One of the biggest draws of Gunboat God is achieving that elusive godly rank. You’ll not likely get any godly ranks in the beginning. You need to play the game, unlock upgrades and abilities, and strengthen your firepower before you can become formiddable enough to do so. In fact, I recommend completing the game fully first before going back and going for the godly ranks. That way you’ll have almost all of the upgrades (if not all of them) to give you the best shot at it.

Godly ranks are one of six star ratings you can receive from completing a level. Starting at ‘Adept’ for one star, you’ll get ‘Godly’ when you’ve mastered the level. This means taking no damage, doing it within the time limit (indicated by the filled bar at the mission review screen), having a decent combo (if applicable), getting as high a score as possible, as well as other mission specific ones (like NPC health).

Weapons

Play with your weapons. You’ll unlock seven across the game and they’re wildly different. Each providing different options for taking on all those meanies. You’ve got to get use to swapping out your weapons if it’s not working for a particular level. I did find the fully upgraded Blaster carried me through a lot of the levels. However, the early, slow firing stage before the special bar had filled necessitated a swap out.

• Lancer – starting weapon, has good range and decent damage.
• Erupter – fires explosives that can damage multiple enemies.
• Blaster – shorter range but higher damage. Beast when fully upgraded.
• Glint – fires a beam of energy that a long range.
• Blitz – fires a short sword like beam of energy that does high damage.
• Vaporiser – slow fire rate but high damage in a wide area
• Dynamo – fires curved beams of energy at enemies, slower fire than say the Blaster but decent damage and stuns enemies.
• Railgun – fires a single shot that requires charging, but does high damage. Accuracy required.

Special Attack

Don’t forget about this. I kept doing so for the first couple of worlds. There’s no penalty for using it and it can do some serious damage, especially if upgraded. There are several challenges that might say ‘don’t use special’ but other than that, do. It’s great for clearing lots of enemies at once, and doing serious damage to bosses.

Bosses

Each world has a boss at the end. They all have three phases. Each phase adds new attacks or environmental hazards to the level so keep an eye out. It may take a few goes but learning the attack patterns for each boss is important to dodging them as they do some serious damage if they hit you.

I would recommend saving four uranium rods and purchasing the ‘Resurrect’ skill, it gives you a revive and a bit of health if you should have died once per level. So it’s a way to give you an extra shot of beating the boss, if needed.

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That’s all the hints and tips for now. Can you think of anything that might be worth people knowing as they strive for their godly ranks? Let us know addy@gamersocialclub.ca and we may add your tip to the guide.