Saturday Morning Gaming: Taking Biogun-Clinical Trial for a spin
A million years ago, there was a really weird movie that came out called Osmosis Jones. Here’s the basic idea: Bill Murray is a widower zookeeper who steals a hard-boiled egg back from one of the monkeys in his charge. He then eats the egg despite the monkey saliva on it. This makes him sick. He takes a cold pill and goes on through his day anyway. We spend some time with him and his daughter and see what happens as the monkey virus tackles his body.
The story of the monkey virus tackling his body is a cartoon. We hang with Osmosis Jones and Drixenol “Drix” Drixobenzometaphedramine (the aforementioned cold pill) as they take on Thrax (the aforementioned virus).
And so we jump back and forth between a live-action Bill Murray being a slovenly zookeeper and a cartoon where a white blood cell takes on a monkey virus.
As I said, weird movie. Not a *BAD* movie. As I recall, it was surprisingly good at what it did. It’s just that what it did was weird.
The whole thing is available for free on Youtube. I mean, if you have 90 minutes to kill.
Anyway. There’s a demo for a game that’s coming out soon on Steam called BioGun: Clinical Trial. In this game, the “Dooper Virus” is going to kill all of the dogs in the world. The Mad Scientist DocX has injected his dog with Bek, a vaccine to kill the Dooper Virus. This is where you come in: You play Bek in a platforming twin-stick shooter where you’re the vaccine.
See why I thought of Osmosis Jones?
Anyway, the graphics are great. I love the colors, I love the characters (what few of them I’ve seen), and the writing is vaguely obnoxious (I believe the official term is “MCU/Reddit”) but it’s not *TOO* obnoxious.
The big tropes from twin stick shooters are there: start out with low-level weenies, eventually fight your way up to the *REALLY* tough bosses and you’d best figure out how to dodge.
As for the gameplay… I dunno. It’s a twin stick shooter, right? But it’s a platforming twin stick shooter. So instead of jumping with one of the four buttons on the right, you’re jumping with a shoulder button. (I mean, sure, you can also jump with A, but then your thumb is on the jump button and not on the shooty stick so you’re not shooting.)
I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m used to twin-stick shooters having a bird’s-eye view of the board so you run around and you shoot things and you may need to avoid obstacles but you definitely don’t need to jump. I mean, it’s not *BAD*. Maybe I’m just 50? I dunno.
The demo is free, for what that’s worth. Try it yourself. Maybe you’ll immediately cotton to it. As for me, I mostly find myself thinking “I wish I was good at this.”
So… what are you playing?
