Just let me kill things, dammit.
Gunfire Echoes is a beautiful, very visually polished game whose main problem is, it constantly tries to punish you for not playing it a certain way. You play a power-armored space marine whose hatred of the enigmatic "Enemy" is matched only by his hatred of monitors, as he struggles to defend a series of increasingly pathetic crumbling outposts from wave after wave of incredibly well-equipped enemies. He starts with a surprisingly effective pistol and a shotgun that works exactly the same as the pistol, but he'll soon get a machine gun that works exactly the same as the pistol but runs out of ammo faster, a sniper rifle that works exactly the same as the pistol except you can't fire it fast enough, and presumably many more, even though I got sick of playing after the third level and so can't testify as to the pistolyness of the weapons you unlock later.
You see, like many Flash games with hastily tacked-on RPG elements, Gunfire Echoes pretends to offer the player a bewildering variety of gameplay styles, an illusion that is shattered instantly when you realize that practically all of the available weapons, options, and upgrades offered to you just don't work. From the turrets that don't work on flying enemies, to the explosive barrels that explode so slowly you can't possibly use them tactically, to the reload mini-game that finishes the animation so slowly you'll miss guys even when you do it perfectly, the game is a veritable smorgasbord of wrong choices. The smart bomb doesn't kill all enemies on-screen but instead only slightly wounds them. Even straight-up damage upgrades that don't mean anything since you'll be making all of your kills with headshots anyway, at least in the early levels.
Later on enemies were coming and going so rapidly that I couldn't even follow what was going on, but the game definitely gets worse, not better, as the difficulty curve ramps up. I'm not even sure if I was expected to keep up some kinda perfect kill-chain of headshots in those situations, or if the game was just pretending to kick my ass with overwhelming numbers, only to lower the difficulty at the last second so I could win.
I have to give andvari3d credit for a spirited attempt at cinematic storytelling within the context of gameplay, but I felt like I was being screwed every time story was happening. The game likes to take away the player's control for no good reason. For example, the camera will pan left and right while you're lining up a shot. Even when you're in control of this mechanic it's largely useless because there's almost always an enemy just crossing the line while you're switching, so you have to switch back. You can't reload while the support character is talking, with the game ordering you to "HOLD YOUR FIRE" even though there's no friendly targets on the screen. In general, the game just likes to cockblock you from doing stuff which you know you *should* be doing, but can't. Even the slow-motion mechanic that helpfully targets an enemy just before they reach the shield is a pain in the ass, since the reload animation (again, even when the mini-game is executed flawlessly) prevents you from firing in time, and the amount of damage it would prevent is usually trivial compared to how much time you waste trying to get the mouse cursor over there.
As I write this, I have no idea what the best upgrades to take first are. As far as I can tell, they all suck. You pretty much know everything you need to know about this game when the first boss swoops in and wipes out all your defenses with one blow, because that's what playing the game feels like. It's frustrating, annoying, pretentious, and unnecessary. It's like the game is playing you instead of the other way around.
The presentation is incredible and the graphics are top-notch, but the gameplay is enough to make you slam your fist down on your monitor, possibly cracking the screen or something. They took a simple, flawless core mechanic, (point & click,) and then caked on so much window-dressing as to render the game practically unplayable.