Samurai Gunn 2 got rebuilt from scratch and it's still ferocious

It is Sunday night and I am kicking my own severed head around on the paving stones. My brother stands on a filthy platform high above me, hand on his katana, he is grinning precisely as a terrible killer might. He dashes left and turns invisible. Not this time. I focus. An entire second passes - a lifetime. I scan the air for signs of hopping feet. 

There! I fire my gun, a flaming bullet strikes a wall, hitting nothing but stone. My two hands freeze with rigor mortis anticipation just as my body is severed into two large pieces. My brother reappears, cackling. I am dead, but at least Samurai Gunn 2 has been reborn.

If you peer back through the bamboo forest of yesteryear you might remember Samurai Gunn 2 coming out in 2021 as an early access couch brawler. It was a high-functioning sequel to one of the most brutally fun multiplayer party fighters this side of Nidhogg. You get three bullets and a sword: fight. 

It saw a roster of special guest characters added over a couple of years, including the little guys from Minit, a crewmate from Among Us, and the cast of Spelunky. It also had a soundtrack as lethal as its many murderers. But updates for the game went very quiet in 2023. Somewhere along the way the devs decided that GameMaker - their original engine - wasn't up to task. 

"The netcode wasn’t rollback-based, making it unstable and slower than a competitive fighting game should be," they said in a Steam post last week. "Developing updates took far too long. It also made supporting the game long-term unfeasible."

"After the behind-the-scenes difficulty of the first few updates, we were at a crossroads. We could either keep rolling out new content and hope for the best, or rebuild the game from scratch in our own custom engine. We chose to rebuild."

Years later and here we are, getting our limbs severed all over again. Samurai Gunn 2 is re-upping with 6 reworked characters of various abilities. Slug can stick to ceilings. Golem's bullets become stone blocks that get in your way. And phantom scumbag Ghost, whom my brother should be forbidden from choosing, can stay invisible for as long as she keeps racking up kills. An absolutely horrific proposition in a four-player free-for-all. 

You can still reflect bullets back at your foe. But you can also now throw them in a grapple if they get too close. I am also happy to report that all characters can still hold the down button to play dead in a pile of your own corpses during a chaotic moment when nobody is paying attention, then leap up and kill like the dirty ghoul you are. Doseone, the game's musician, is the game's announcer and will yell "GOT CUT" when you are defeated and "EMBARASSING" in the event that you have been completely steamrolled. Not that this happened to me or anything.

There are some drawbacks to the relaunch. The light story mode it once had has been cut completely, and if the character you love was one of those post-release updates, you now have to wait all over again for them to be re-added. There's 16 fighty folks to come according to the roadmap, alongside a 2v2 team-up mode and some online match spectating. There'll also be a free version sometime soon, in which people can play as a single character who rotates every month.

As if to absolve themselves of the guilt of temporarily cutting content, the developers held a messy (re)launch stream in which they battled all-comers online - and were showered with fake blood any time they lost. I'm glad my bro and I did not commit to this same idea last night when he HID LIKE A COWARD FROM MY BLADE.