Gori: Cuddly Carnage review

Back in the early noughties when I was but an awkward teen boy, games were gory and crass. Like all awkward teen boys this was perfect for me, and I gleefully used Cerebral Bores in Turok and sliced up innocent animals in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. In modern times though it’s become less common to see over the top violence and poo jokes, and as much as I like to pretend I’ve grown out of that too, sometimes I just want to play something bloody and over the top. Gori: Cuddly Carnage is the perfect cure for this issue, and because all the gore is happening to stuffed toys, you don’t even have to feel like a horrible person for playing it.

Our protagonist Gori is but a humble housecat, at least until the world is taken over by stuffed unicorns and their jack-in-a-box bear leader. With Gori’s beloved owner kidnapped, it’s up to this humble kitty and a bunch of snazzy inventions to save the day through extreme violence. With blood and swearing galore this tale won’t please everyone, but I found it rather refreshing.

To take back the planet from sentient murder toys you’ll need a weapon worthy of a hero. For Gori that’s a hoverboard, which can be spun and slammed to create a whirlwind of death. This is the character action combat that we all know and love, with light and heavy attacks that’ll ensure all things fluffy are pulverised effectively.

As you might expect the hoverboard is good for more than just murder too, and ensures getting around is a breeze. Rails can be grinded, walls can be ridden, and gaps can be boosted across with ease on your trusty talking metal board. Mastering the board will serve you well in Gori: Cuddly Carnage’s many chase sequences, but is also used to refresh your fuel meter for special attacks as you grind and wallride.

Your violent bag of tricks in Gori: Cuddly Carnage is as vast as it is deadly, with all sorts of attacks you can use on the varied enemies who deserve to experience them. Shielded enemies need bashing, flying enemies are easier to hit with rockets than with melee attacks, and your own shield can be used to smash into foes like blood filled skittles. Each move in your arsenal has its own unique purpose and is required if you want to save your owner, and thankfully they’re introduced at the perfect pace throughout the campaign.

As well as gaining new moves as you travel from bizarre sci-fi stage to bizarre sci-fi stage, you’ll also gain currency that you can spend on upgrades to make Gori an even more deadly fighting machine. Different attacks can be made stronger, rockets can be upgraded to add more to more ammo before needing to recharge and health and fuel can be bolstered if they run low too often. Keeping your bank topped up to unlock these powerful stat upgrades is pretty necessary, so you’ll need to aim for high scores and fast completion times in the stages for those big cash bonuses.

By far the most impressive aspect of Gori: Cuddly Carnage is the amount of new ideas and gimmicks packed into each of the game’s eight stages. You’ll go from jumping into arcade games and shooting targets to chasing a goldfish in a flooded factory and draining it as you go to avoid drowning. The different gimmicks keep the game fresh from start to finish, and make it easy to binge.

If you’d prefer more fighting and less faffing, then the arena stages are an option too. Each level features an unlockable arena where you’ll face waves of enemies with high scores to beat and extra money on the line for doing so. These entirely optional bonus stages showcase one of the best parts of Gori: the flow of blending combat and rad tricks to maximise your damage output, and this ensured I played them all.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a blast to play, but it has a couple of things that prevent it from being best in show when it comes to character action. The combat, while fun, just isn’t tight enough to be at the top tier of the genre, and there’s a lack of depth in combos that those looking for something more complex will be disappointed by. The boss fights vary in quality too, with a couple that were far more annoying than they were actually fun.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a bloody fun time, with a whole lot of ideas packed inside its crude and rude outer shell. The combat, while not the best in class, is entertaining and frantic, and the amount of interesting new abilities you get as you go is rather impressive. Some won’t appreciate the constant swearing and gratuitous violence, but for everyone else this is one gory game you won’t want to put down.