Gun Gun Pixies

Developer: Idea Factory, SHADE | Publisher: PQube Limited | Release Date: 2019 | Genre: Action / 3rd Person Shooter / Adventure | Website: N/A | Purchase: Steam

Gun Gun Pixies introduces players to Bee-tan and Kame-pon, two tiny aliens from the planet Pandemo. These two were sent to Earth by the Pandemo military in an effort to save their own world. Apparently, the population of Pandemo has become isolated and instead of cooperating everyone there prefers to work and live on their own. With even friendship and intimacy being scarce on Pandemo, it spells disaster for the future of their world. Since Bee-tan and Kame-pon are friends, they are considered to be the ideal candidates for a six-month mission to an all-female dorm on Earth to gather intelligence. Their research on the living habits of Earth inhabitants will then be fed back to Pandemo to improve their own society. It sounds like a pretty straightforward mission, but when the pixies find themselves surrounded by girls who are not only very emotional but also tower over them, things become a little more complicated.

Players who are familiar with Gun Gun Pixies will know that it was originally a Playstation Vita exclusive in Japan a few years back. Now Idea Factory and SHADE, with the assistance of PQube, have decided to bring this very niche 3rd person shooter to PC. Players can take control of Bee-tan, the pervy pixie, or Kame-pon, who tends to take the mission a little more seriously, and then explore Lilypad, the dorm setting for the entire game. The only difference between the two, apart from their personalities and looks, is that Bee-tan favors a handgun while Kame-pon wields an assault rifle. It might sound weird that two peaceful aliens on a fact-finding mission would be packing heat, but these are no ordinary weapons.

Instead of lethal projectiles the guns wielded by the pixies shoot something called “Happy Bullets.” If you hit the girls enough times with these bullets they go into a state of euphoria and reveal information that they would not have disclosed under normal circumstances. This information can be useful for the mission, but as the pixies become more involved in the lives of the girls they start using it to help them out with personal problems too. The game is pure light-hearted, goofy fun for the most part, but it also touches upon a few deeper aspects with the girls plagued by all kinds of doubts and insecurities. All of the story elements in Gun Gun Pixies are handled via visual novel style 2D scenes and there are plenty of these before, during and after missions. However, the real reason why Gun Gun Pixies draws so much attention is the fan service and this is something that the game has in spades.

Since the entire game is set inside an all- girls dorm, it stands to reason that you’ll see the girls roaming about in various states of undress. The pixies can also target various body parts of the girls when shooting at them with happy bullets and some spots are obviously a lot more jiggly than others. In addition, the game makes very sure that the girls perform all kinds of suggestive poses and given their size in relation to the pixies, it is inevitable that you’ll be looking up their dresses most of the time.

It’s not just the humans that you get to ogle at either. The pixies themselves wear pretty revealing outfits, especially when you make them crawl around on hands and knees (for stealth purposes of course.) These outfits can disappear pretty quickly if the pixies are hit by enemies or projectiles, which eventually leaves them running around completely in the buff. Fortunately for their modesty, their nudity is covered up by some strategically placed beams of light. The fan service doesn’t end here either. Your reward for completing each chapter is a level that is set during the bath time of one of the girls. Here you get to blast away at the soap bubble covered girls in the bath and even jump on their bodies for some close contact to rake in the coins. These coins can then, in turn, be used to purchase new items from the shop, such as gun upgrades, better weapon scopes, and new underwear for the pixies. Incidentally, the underwear you sometimes find on the floor in the girls’ rooms can be scanned by your pixies to add them to the shop for your pixie to wear.

Don’t expect the rest of the game to feature the same type of close contact with the girls though. The pixies are under very strict orders to stay out of sight, which means that during normal missions you do not want to get too close to the girls. Two gages are displayed at the top of the screen, one for when you are in the visual range of the girls, and one to show how much noise you are making in her proximity. If you fill either of these gages too much or get hit while in the nude, then it’s back to the last checkpoint. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to avoid detection and even losing all your clothes isn’t too much of a disaster if you get to one of the specially marked spots that allow you to regenerate them. These spots also serve as sniper vantage points as they increase the strength of your bullets if you stand on them. If you stray within the sight range of the girls they won’t freak out immediately, but instead, become suspicious as the gauge fills up. This gives you enough time to leg out of sight or employ one of the other tricks up your sleeve, which is posing as an action figure. This can be done with the tap of a button and immediately causes your pixie to become motionless while striking a funny pose. Some of these poses are funny or heroic while a few ranges from sexy to downright lewd.

Unfortunately for Gun Gun Pixies, the game is somewhat lacking when it comes to variety. The entire game takes place in a single dorm and even there, apart from the bathtub scenes, you only ever get to run around the three different bedrooms. Missions take the form of either search and combat or pacification. In the former, you have to run around the rooms using your scope to search for areas of interest, which can then be investigated for clues. Meanwhile, there is usually a girl roaming around the room who you can also shoot in the lower body, upper body, or head for more information. Later on, some mysterious squid-like enemies are introduced and while they are invisible to the girls, they can harm your pixie, so you must shoot them too. Every so often the girls will secrete “gloom” which takes the form of massive projectiles that can knock your pixie down. Pacification missions are more akin to boss fights as you no longer have to worry about stealth, but the girls shoot a lot more projectiles your way and have a lot more vulnerable spots that you need to shoot. In this mode, you’ll need to dodge hearts, stars, sweat, and gloom, along with the enemies, while shooting girls in the butt, breasts, head, back, feet and more. The girls will usually also be engaged in more energetic activities, such as yoga, pole dancing and so on. New girls are introduced throughout the chapters, and there’s even one that features a Hyperdimension Neptune cameo, but it’s not long before you’ve experienced everything the game has to offer gameplay-wise. This means that repetition can set in very quickly and some missions can begin to feel like a chore as you are just doing the same things over and over again.

Visually, the game looks decent and we really liked all of the character designs. The 2D scenes are on par with most visual novels while the 3D models are not super detailed, but fit the style of the game. Each of the bedrooms is unique, with lots of different things to climb over or crawl under, but visual variation is definitely lacking due to the limited number of locations. The animations are great, especially if you love fan service, as especially the bath scenes feature a couple that is sure to raise a few eyebrows. The audio is also decent and while the tunes are not exactly memorable all the characters are voiced in Japanese, which is a nice touch.

Unfortunately, things fall apart a bit when it comes to the controls. The game can be played with a controller or via the keyboard and mouse, but neither option can really hide how clumsy everything feels. The controls can feel downright unresponsive, especially when jumping and changing direction while running feels very cumbersome. To make matters worse, it’s easy for your pixie to become stuck on objects while trying to flee and the camera is a real pain to deal with at times. If you end up in a tight spot the camera usually locks up, which is not ideal for a game where you regularly run behind things or navigate tight spots. You get used to the controls and later unlock a hook shot to quickly get up certain spots, but the controls definitely caused us the most frustration. Thankfully your pixies won’t die if they fall from a great height, as this would really have sucked. At the end of each level, you are given a ranking, which is based on the number of coins you collected, the information you found, the damage you have taken and your accuracy.

There is no doubt that Gun Gun Pixies is a very niche title, so we are sure that a lot of fans will be willing to overlook most of the issues with the game, especially if they are into the fan service. Kudos to the developers and the publisher for not butchering the game to appease people who would never even dream of actually playing it. We like how each chapter in Gun Gun Pixies is almost its own self-contained story as it allowed us to play the game in short bursts without things becoming too repetitive. The game also unlocks a whole host of goodies, including 2D and 3D character viewers, when you complete it, so it’s worth the effort. Levels can also be replayed in free mode upon completion, although we suspect players will mostly use this feature to milk the bathroom scenes for extra coins. Overall, Gun Gun Pixies was entertaining despite how repetitive it can become and there were also plenty of laugh out loud moments that kept us entertained. The game could definitely benefit from a bit more polish, but overall we think fans of the genre will have fun with it.