A bond between a boy and his favorite flash game is sacred. Any school librarian could attest to that after seeing droves of kids hog up the library computer during breaks.
And if you’re entering the age of “2 ibuprofen’s just to make it through the day”, dear ever-young reader, you’ve likely had one of your own. Maybe it was a clone of an existing licensed game. Maybe it tickled your oddly specific edgy niche. Or maybe it was a strange physics-based sandbox which seemed like dark magic to be running in Flash. Gunboat God feels a lot like that last category.
A stylish and relentless shooter throwing monochromatic terrors at you from above and below. Is it worth your time? Can you handle it? Find out in our Gunboat God review!
Gunboat God
Developer: Janson RAD
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Platforms: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Release Date: April 13th, 2026
Price: $12.99 (25% launch day discount)
Story and Setting
Set on a strange flooded world not unlike our own, you play as a weak human cast down from a sky palace by a final boss-shaped figure. Instead of falling into the tender embrace of the oceans surface tension, you land safely into a metallic gunboat.
This marvel of post-apocalyptic engineering was constructed by a friendly crocodile called Yeti. Because the boat itself isn’t quite finished yet and key pieces are scattered across the flooded landscape, Yeti instructs you to help him gather them up so you can become the titular GUNBOAT GOD.
Your human character does not speak or react much. The only emotion you get from him is covering his face from the gunfire and flailing around like a whacky inflatable arm-flailing tube man.
It has the personality of a leaf stuck behind a windshield wiper.
In fact, apart from final boss’s two short monologues, Yeti will be the only one doing the talking. While he means well and is constantly helping you improve your (our) boat, he will reliably tease you as well. Pretending to be strict and having low expectations of us, he’ll take it back in the next line every time, providing you with a small, but meaningful, line of encouragement. While there is no spoken dialogue, just text boxes, Yeti’s grunts and roars all sound good and didn’t feel repetitive even towards the end of the game.
In a game as arcade-y as this, the story doesn’t really have much of an impact and Gunboat God knows it. Yeti will sometimes signal towards an impending cliche only to go “Nah, that’s not how we roll, just go to the next level and shoot more stuff, champ”.
Presentation
This deceptively monochromatic title is actually full of color. While all the actors and obstacles are black and white, the environments are as colorful as a line up of Monster Energy cans in the cooler at your local gas station (we’re not sponsored by Monster Energy, but really could be… wink-wink, nudge-nudge).
You can change the color of your health bar and damage flash colors in the visual settings. That way you can make sure not to lose sight of it amidst all the red gunfire particles.
The backgrounds and UI change color depending on the world you’re in and the gameplay mode you’re currently playing on. We’ll talk more about the Dread Mode later, but for now all you need to know is that it sends the entire color palette into The Piss dimension.
Enemy types, level hazards and background elements are all tied to their respective worlds, there’s 5 of those in the game.
What’s really neat is the fact that the game leans into the fact the world is flooded. It’s all floating precariously on the same surface you’re playing the game on. So any time you or the enemies make waves, it wobbles the entire world around you.
That may sound annoying and distracting, but in practice you’ll be so occupied by waves of enemies, the waves in the water will become a secondary hazard. While the obstacles maintain their position on X axis, they will be rotated and moved up and down by the waves, which can make navigation tricky, but cements the fact that this game is set in a water world (just not as pricey as the one you’re thinking of).
It should be noted that all the models and animations are done in 3D and were put through a filter to appear 2D. It’s a similar technique used by Motion Twin in Dead Cells to achieve very smooth animations.
The bleepy-bloopy soundtrack is alright and can get stuck in your head for a few days, so moderation is key. Considering most levels are less than 5 minutes long, you’ll be hearing the beginning of every song pretty often. But the sound effects for score count and the intro are extremely satisfying, you’ll be playing level after level just for the dopamine hit of that sound stacking.
Gameplay
Ah, we’re finally at the meat and ‘taters part of the review.
As stated earlier, this is a funky shooter where you control a jumping and submersible gunboat and try to navigate dynamic levels with shifting objectives.
Killing enemies fills up your speed and power bars. So the more enemies you kill, the faster you’ll move and higher your fire-rate will become. Not maintaining the pressure on your enemies will drop your momentum and can make navigation difficult. Especially after you have grown accustomed to the new handling. Each of the 5 speed stages handles differently and determines the height of your jumps or depth of your dives. Thus you’ll often find yourself stuck at the beginning of a stage, unable to clear a big piece of floating debris until you kill enough enemies.
There are 5 worlds divided into 20-70 levels, each only lasting about 5 minutes, if not less. The one exception is World 5, which only contains two levels and a final boss fight. Each world also has their own sets of enemies, level hazards and respective bosses.
Levels themselves vary in terms of objectives and difficulty spikes. Some are straight to the point Onslaught levels where you simply have to survive waves of enemies. Others play like a platforming puzzle or a race. While others still resemble Mario Party mini-games. There are optional missions spread around, but they rarely offer any kind of substantial reward or even special challenge for you to play them.
Speaking of rewards, you performance is graded on a star system. How much damage and time you take to finish a level, what kind of hit combo you maintain and whether you manage to fulfill a special challenge will determine your rewards.
Simply completing a level will net you the basic resources to upgrade your weapons. Interestingly, you increase the damage of all weapons simultaneously. That way, even if you play favorites and a mission will require you to use the runt of your arsenal, you’ll be able to maintain a respectable DPS. Each of the 8 weapons still has their own unique upgrades. Completing challenges helps you unlock permanent abilities of your gunboat like double dashing, ground pound, tooting and more. Trust me, tooting is essential for crowd control.
The more levels you go through, the more weapons and abilities you unlock. Some are restricted to the Dread Mode. In this mode enemies move quicker, hit harder and your gun-boat turns into a gun-origami. This is essentially the Hard Mode of the game. To compensate for the difficulty, helpful mutators like Bullet Penetration and Directional Damage can be enabled here. The yellow stays on though. The Piss Dimension is omnipresent.
While we’re talking about difficulty, it’s important to mention that Gunboat God does not hold back. It’s balls to the wall action from level 10 onward. Remember: there are hundreds of levels in this game and you’re gonna get filtered early. If the game becomes too much for you to handle, you can opt for one of the “Assisted modes” in the game options, which is just a fancy word for “Difficulty select”. Unorthodox, but not too obscure to find. Once you get over the initial difficulty spike and start investing into weapon damage, you’ll stop sweating all over your seat.
Bosses can be annoying too, but learning their patterns is fun and I’m sure you’ll get them on your second or third try. The annoying part is the fact that you have to sit through their unskippable intro every time unless you directly restart the level. Going back to the map or upgrade screen will reset their intro, so you’ll have to sit there and wait for the animation or monologue to finish.
This and the fact that the game becomes repetitive if you play it for too long are my only complaints. Best enjoyed in short, controlled bursts. Mayhaps with a friend. Did I mention this game has couch co-op? Because this game has couch co-op. Connect a controller to connect with your friend in jolly mayhem.
While this could just as well have been a flash game back in the day, Gunboat God is littered with gameplay nuances and satisfying details in the audio and visual department. If you’re not afraid of an old-school arcade challenge, you owe it to yourself to give this pearl a go.
Gunboat God was reviewed on Windows PC using a code provided by Fireshine Games. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Gunboat God is now available for Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4|5, Xbox One and Series X|S.