Gal Guardians: Demon Purge
In order to save their school after it turns into a massive demonic castle, two "Demon Hunter" sisters slash and shoot their way through this 2D action adventure. Players can swap between control of both characters on the fly, each with entirely different skillsets.
Gal Guardians: Demon Purge is a action, adventure and 2d platformer game
developed and published by INTI CREATES CO. and LTD..
Released on February 23rd 2023 is available only on Windows
in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Portuguese - Brazil, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
It has received 1,020 reviews of which 828 were positive and 192 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 11.99€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.
The Steam community has classified Gal Guardians: Demon Purge into these genres:
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7, 8.1, 10
- Processor: 2Ghz or faster processer
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2GB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce)
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Gal Guardians: Demon Purge is a 2D action platformer that has solid boss design and platforming with some questionable level design choices. Do not be misled by Steam's user tags- this is NOT a metroidvania. GGDP is far more similar to the Curse of the Moon games than Ritual of the Night. You play as two sisters, who find that their school has been taken over by demons. Fortunately said sisters are demon hunters and resolve to take it back. The elder sister, Shinobu, deals with ranged weapons whereas the younger sister. Maya, is melee focused. While the game offers co-op action, you can play through the game single player and swap between the sisters at will. Both get unique subweapons that both work for offense and level traversal. Each sister feels like she plays uniquely and has situations both in and out of combat where each excel. While the gameplay is level based, new subweapons are unlocked with each stage which opens alternate pathways within each stage upon replaying it. None of these, sadly, lead to unique levels or significantly new aspects to stages which is a missed opportunity. Each level ends in a boss encounter and this is where the game shines. INTI CREATES has fantastic boss design in the Curse of the Night games and GGDP keeps that streak alive. The bosses are varied and while not overly difficult, are certainly no pushovers. However (at least on normal difficulty settings) if you die to a boss, when you reenter the boss room after respawning, a decent portion of the boss's health is still missing due the efforts of your previous attempt. While I embrace the accessibility this brings, I think there should be an option to toggle it on/off. The game has a total of eight levels and to progress through the story you must play through these levels multiple times. The levels are solid but playing through them several times makes it feel a bit stale by the end. It should be worth noting that the story takes a huge left turn after your first run through these eight levels which may be a bit of a deal maker/breaker for players. The reason for this sudden swerve of the plot is due to the game being a part of the GalGun universe. I was not familiar with that series before the game and if you are not either, I would strongly recommend looking it up before buying. For me, the aspects of this shared universe and its tropes usually prompted an eyeroll, sigh or occasional shake of the head but did not really negatively impact my impression of the game. What does negatively impact my impression of the game is that when you replay it there are several collectibles that are tasked with picking up. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing. However there is no in-game map of each level, so it is impossible to tell which branching path you didn't take. Also there is nothing that indicates how much of each of the various collectibles you have actually picked up in each stage, and the names of a certain type of collectible are largely randomized so even using a guide is difficult. This caused me to loop through those same eight levels significantly more times that really should have been necessary and caused my good will towards the individual level design to quickly erode. Having an in-game map or even a vague checklist for each stage could have prevented so much frustration and I am flabbergasted this could have been overlooked. Questionable game design aside, I had a good time with GGDP but would have had a great time with a decent map and clear checklist of collectibles even if they were not marked on said map. Even with that frustration, I did enjoy the game enough to recommend it, even if it comes with a sizeable asterisk.
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Gal Guardians wears its inspiration on its sleeves proudly. There's no mistaking where or what it borrows from or pays homage to. While definitely weaving a tale of pure satire (mixed with a dash of fanservice), it performs extremely well as a castlevania-like. However, unlike many of the current-era metroidvanias, it follows the playstyle and progression of past games like Rondo of Blood and Circle of the Moon much more. In addition, it also allows for coop play, as it borrows the moment to moment gameplay from Konami's Portrait of Ruin wherein you must hotswap between two characters to progress. All in all, a fun romp that only starts to become aggravating when achievement hunting. While I'd expect an extra playthrough or two, this title, to get 100%, requires quite a few things to be found. And like Rondo, it sadly has absolutely no in-game map to refer to while you're hunting. It's still fun, just forewarning if you're in a completionist.
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TL;DR: Very niche - unless you're an old school gamer looking for a 16-bit styling of an 8 bit Metroid-like (but NOT Metroidvania), or you're a die-hard Gal Gun franchise fan, you may find more confusion and annoyance than fun. Fortunately for me, I'm both of the above, so this fell right into my wheelhouse. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am happy to support the series in hopes Inti will keep building on the franchise, but I can definitely see flaws that need to be addressed. I'll start with the big controversy that has dogged this game since launch, the question of if it is a metroidvania, and as above, I say no, or perhaps better to say, not quite. It has a lot of components of a metroidlike - multiple paths through areas, obtained upgrades and abilities that are required to open some of those paths, power-ups and collectibles and easter eggs that require exploration to find, secret rooms and triggers that those things are found in and through. It also has elements of a vanialike - room-by-room progression of platforming and stair climbing, annoying enemies that spawn offscreen and fly through screen in wave patterns to complicate jumps, wall-mounted breakables, and of course the faux-gothic aesthetics. But a key element of the metroidvania genre, as found in seminal titles like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, is FREEDOM, which this game sorely lacks. In old-school Castlevania fashion, everything is laid out in levels, not just in style, but in progress - every time you visit an area, you start at a beginning, work through mostly in one direction on only one of two or three routes (with a lot of one-way gates limiting ability to backtrack), then reach a boss, clear it, and exit the stage. There is no ability to do the first run of a stage out of order - though you can interrupt your progress by redoing a previously cleared stage, you cannot do a stage until beating the boss of the stage before it. And you cannot easily exit a stage - the only way out is either to reach the end, or to exit the game (it does give you the option to do this in a way that lets you keep items collected, but not your progress in the stage). As for revisiting prior stages, this WILL happen - to finish the game requires clearing each stage at least twice, and to 100% it will require at least thrice, but I think I did each stage at least four times, some more. So if you're looking for later-style, free roaming Castlevania, this isn't it. And the gameplay itself is often very reminiscent of the unforgiving mechanics and harsh penalties of the 8-bit era. While it is not overly hard per se, most deaths and failures feel cheap - either from being knocked into an instantly fatal fall, or succumbing to boss attack patterns you aren't given a fair opportunity to learn, aside from dying to them again and again and again until you finally see and understand them all, including the "death spell" each does as a final unique attempt to kill you after you empty its health bar. And jumping takes some getting used to, as I found the "falloff point" of ledges to be about six inches earlier than they visually appear to be. Meanwhile, the Gal Gun influence plays out in a very odd way, that may be very offputting for those not familiar with the franchise. From the start, the game assumes you already know everything about the characters - no exposition is offered for why Shinobu and Maya are schoolgirl demon hunters, why Kurona has such an odd definition of "prank" or why she's doing her thing, who the hell "Ho-nii" is, or any of the background history. It just drops all these random references and builds on the history as though you surely must know it (which I did, but relying on that knowledge emphasized for me how little of it this game was explaining). And at first, that won't really matter - it's just a basic video game premise, after all, and gameplay built upon it is just standard pixelated action. But as the story progresses, things will start getting weird, unless you're expecting Gal Gun style. One minute you're just killing demons, but suddenly you're hunting for a porno mag to excite a column (no, that is not a typo), having random schoolgirls say assorted off-colour remarks about being your maid, that she's unworthy vermin, wanting you to dominate her, or that she's a borderline cat, and you're collecting their panties from all over the castle. If you've played other Gal Gun games this all makes sense, but to an outsider this level of comedic perviness will just seem out of place. So it is very niche. But it does what it aims to well, and once you learn the mechanics, the strategies, the ledge endpoints, and the boss tells and patterns, it's a tight, solid platformer. I enjoyed it, and so long as the oddball ecchi in the lategame doesn't bother you, an old-school platform gamer should enjoy it too. So yes, recommended. But I never want to hear the word "FEETZIEZ" ever again. . . . . Also, game does not feature best waifu Saori Fujino :-( Had to be said.
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It's Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 3. But it's got Gal Gun characters, instead of Bloodstained characters. No, this doesn't actually affect the gameplay or design at all. It's also gone from "8-bit" aesthetic to "16/early 32-bit" aesthetic. It is NOT a Metroidvania, and I don't know how people ever labelled it as such. It is the same format as Curse of the Moon 1 and 2. You have 7 stages, you go from start to finish, you kill a boss, next stage. There are multiple paths thru each stage, which will have different power-ups and collectables. Instead of up to 4 (8) characters to collect and swap between with their own abilities, you have 2 characters, each with their own quirks, who each get a collection of subweapons as you progress thru the stages (which just happen to mostly cover the traversal and utility weapons from Curse of the Moon 1/2). You get a new subweapon each stage for each character, subweapons can be freely selected at any time, and you can revisit previously stages at any time. THIS IS AN AWFUL IDEA to do right as you're starting the game, is a waste of time in-genearl, and again, I don't know whoever started throwing the "Metroidvania" tag out there, because it is WRONG. Whereas the format of the previous Curse of the Moon games was "beat game, new quest available with other characters/characters you didn't have at the start before", the format of Demon Purge is "beat all the stages, get booted back to the start with all your gear and upgrades for Lap 2, get ending depending on how much work you put into combing the stages for stuff". Read: there is almost zero reason to replay the stages until you've beaten them all once, and collected all the subweapons. Don't make the same mistake I did. Did you like Curse of the Moon 1 and 2? You'll probably like this. Did you like Gal Gun? They made a Curse of the Moon game in that setting, good for you. The game itself is overall easier than those, to note, unless you go for the hardest options (which, again, mirror the other Curse of the Moon games). After clearing the game outright, you have the option to do a collectathon, involving combing EVERY nook and cranny of every path of every stage, for an alternate ending, but that's really for the most dedicated people. (No, really.)
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Pseudo-metroid / Pantsu-vania. Very enjoyable 2D action game. It's quite linear and stripped out of RPG elements. I love to see it! Beautiful pixel art, great voice acting and a witty story with average gameplay mechanics.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 22 November 2024 11:19 |
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| SteamSpy data | 20 December 2024 01:17 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:30 |
| Steam reviews | 22 December 2024 05:47 |
Online players
24
Developer
INTI CREATES CO., LTD.
Publisher
INTI CREATES CO., LTD.
Release
23 Feb 2023
Platforms