Gun Gun Pixies Review

Gun Gun Pixies features tiny alien girls from the planet Pandemo travelling to Earth to infiltrate a women’s dormitory to learn about our society to help fix problems on their home planet. Bee-tan and Kame-pon, the titular pixies, end up helping out the dorm’s inhabitants whilst getting into a series of interesting situations.

If you’ve ever played a Compile Heart game you’ll know that they make it blatantly clear from the outset that you’re in for a lot of fanservice, often lewd in nature, and Gun Gun Pixies is no different. It features a cast of predominantly female anime girls with chests that bounce at the slightest provocation and protagonists whose clothes are merely a suggestion.

The game itself is a simple third person shooter with some basic exploration and collection elements. The game’s setup has you infiltrating the rooms in the dorm to perform some very simple tasks, usually searching for a specific object like a laptop or eliminating all the enemies. Doing these progresses you to the next visual novel style cutscene until you are ultimately rewarded with a sequence involving one of the characters in a bath after you “pacify” them with your Happy Bullets. Subtlety is this game’s middle name.

As mentioned, the game’s objectives are split into three types: finding objects, shooting enemies and pacifying the girls who live in the dorm. As you are an alien pixie girl, the rest of the world towers over you and exploring the rooms to find what you are looking for is initially quite fun, but it doesn’t take long before it all becomes extremely repetitive.

Strewn around each room are coins (called Picoins) that you can spend on weapon upgrades and costumes for the pixies. There are also ammo refill canisters and glowing points that can be used to power up your shots and fix your clothes after taking damage. Oddly, upgrades and other purchases can only be done after initially loading your game.

The rooms themselves are quite well laid out, often having multiple routes to make getting to important sections more interesting. This is important as the game only has a handful of locations and you’ll be seeing them a lot. Unfortunately the game’s controls when it comes to jumping are really stiff, having a really awkward animation that makes getting around quite frustrating. Fortunately actually running around and shooting stuff is fine and quite enjoyable.

The gameplay is extremely simplistic with the shooting feeling fun but simply functional. Combined with the stiff movement it’s not exactly a remarkable game but the characters themselves help bring the experience together. The visual novel sections make up a large portion of the game and if you don’t enjoy them then you’ll get very little out of the game.

The alien pixies Usamael (Bee-Tan) and Kameriel (Kame-Pon) are really great characters and their interplay can’t help but bring a smile to your face whilst playing. Bee-Tan especially is so over the top with her amorous demands at every opportunity with Kame-Pon trying to keep her focused on the job at hand. It’s a great dynamic that makes for plenty of obvious but still funny gags.

The game also deals with some relatively serious topics that are at odds with the overly sexualised, lewd nature of the rest of the game. Topics such as body shaming, diet concern, the nature of friendship all come up and are dealt with in a surprisingly mature (if not very nuanced) way. It also features cameos from Hyperdimension Neptunia characters which is a fun nod to Compile Hearts’ other series.

Other than the repetitious gameplay the game does have other problems which may or may not affect how you see the game. The most glaring is that the game goes to great lengths on startup to ensure that it’s made clear the girls are all 18+, but it then undercuts that somewhat when a character mentions that certain characters are definitely under that. That might make you feel uncomfortable given some of the activities that occur in the game.

Outside of that though the localisation is okay but disappointing. Unfortunately the script didn’t have enough scrutiny and clearly wasn’t proofread. There are a massive amount of typos and occasions where words are used incorrectly, literally inverting the intended line (The use of “Several Days Ago” instead of “Several Days Later” for example).

Gun Gun Pixies is an enjoyable if simplistic third person shooter. Its origins as a PlayStation Vita game are clear in the visuals as the environments are quite barebones and basic, but the experience as a whole is fun. The stiff jumping and amount of mistakes in the localisation do detract from the experience but it is a quirky, often funny title that is worth experiencing. It’d be hard to recommend at a £40-60 price point as there isn’t really that much to it, but it’s worth considering if you see it cheaper.