Guts and Glory - Get to the End or Die Trying!

A game that's much more about the guts than the Glory.

Going Off-Road

There's something incredibly rewarding about finishing an obstacle course. If you look back at the development of video games, you can see the influence of those courses on the earliest plat-former's. Guts and Glory is from that same tradition. By testing the skills of the player as one tries to navigate a hostile environment. Guts and Glory may be about the punishment that comes from failure as the rewards a player gets from success.

A Game with Guts

If you were ever a fan of Flash games, you probably remember Happy Wheels. It was a surprisingly gory game that was all about helping your character navigate through obstacles. Guts and Glory is Happy Wheels taken into a 3D setting, with more vehicles, more gore, and a lot more obstacle variety.

Guts and Glory is an even more sadistic version of Trials.

While Trials might put you through the wringer, the goal is always to complete the course. Guts and Glory, though, seems to be just as much about getting it wrong as it is about getting it right. A great deal of the charm theoretically comes from the bloody results of your mistakes, though even these get repetitive in time.

Short on the Glory

Another area in which this game is going almost certainly to get compared to Happy Wheels is in the graphics, and that's not necessarily a good thing. This game is, put, ugly. It's not ugly cute; it's not ugly fun - it's just ugly. It feels like a more polished version of the late 90s' attempts at realistic human bodies, but without the charm. I

Mozart could compose the audio here, and it still wouldn't make the game's ugliness any more tolerable.

Is there audio here? Yes, and it's okay. It's not enough to save this game, though. The sound is pretty generic across the board, and they neither add nor take away from the game. It's entirely possible that the game is meant to be played on mute - honestly, all you're going to remember is that it is ugly.

An Unintentionally Wild Ride

You could forgive an awful lot in terms of how this game looks if it played well, but it doesn't. One almost wants to throw this game in that big category of games like QWOP - games where the difficulty of the controls are all part of the charm - but it's not meant to be there. Simply put, the controls are an active enemy in this game.

The thing is, this is a game that should either be about precision control or a game that's about intentionally awful controls. Instead, it's a game with the latter that wants to have the former, making it almost impossible to play at times and frustrating at best. No matter what the intent was, the game suffers for the poor control scheme.

Leave it in the Garage

Guts and Glory is an incredibly unpolished game that actively punishes those who try it out. With ugly graphics and bad controls, it's much more fun to watch someone else fail at the game than it is to try and succeed. It is, in short, the kind of game that is much better in theory than it is in practice.

TL/DR

Guts and Glory is a gory obstacle game with abysmal controls.