General Information
Branching off from the popular on-rails shooter series Gal Gun, Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark follows 2023’s Demon Purge in applying the skills Inti gained while working on the Bloodstained games. It features strong character design, varied combat, and the familiar exploration loop that you've come to expect.
The story takes place in a world where three realms — demon, heaven, and human — are precariously balanced. Masha and Kirika, students from the demon realm, return from vacation only to find their castle under attack. Their leader, Maxim, has been defeated and is now just a shattered remnant of his former self (or more accurately, a floating head). To restore him they must find and defeat Lord Lyzenorg, the head of a rival demon faction.
If you played the previous game or are familiar with the universe it spun off from, you’ll feel right at home. However, newcomers might find the plot a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, you can largely ignore the story and just focus on the flashy combat and the parade of outrageous enemies.
The deuteragonists have distinct fighting styles tied to their primary attack. Kirika wields the genre staple whip for close combat melee, while her sister Masha straight up blasts monsters with an Uzi. It’s incredibly fun to run around as a bishōjo-style magic schoolgirl that shoots enemies like it’s an '80s action movie. Masha even has a shotgun blast slide, for close encounters.
Heaps of attack variation come in the form of secondary weapons that can be gathered from enemies and chests. Swords, projectiles, explosives and utility items can all be equipped in two support slots. This encourages experimentation and also means that any challenging enemy, like the game's many punishing boss fights, can be tackled in a number of ways.
The ability to swap between sisters on the fly adds an extra layer of complexity to the combat. They have separate health pools and one can resurrect the other in the heat of battle. If you have the room to do it, it’s useful to be able to mash 'Y' and shove your sister’s soul back into her body.
The floating head of Maxim will also help you out, his support changing based on items you can equip on him. Collecting his bones and bringing them back to the castle will also grow Maxim’s strength and the core stats of the sisters.
The castle itself is an evolving hub area that grows as you make progress in the story. Picking up lost souls and putting them back into their corpses will introduce NPCs to the hub, most of which add an actual function to the game.
As fun as it is, Servants of the Dark stumbles in its lack of original ideas and bland environment design. While the enemy variety is often exceptional, the levels themselves don't quite measure up. Aside from the many nooks and crannies of Maxim’s castle, none of the areas really stand out. You’ve got the usual themed lineup — forest, dungeon, ice, fire — but there's not much happening in the background or foreground to make the basic terrain feel interesting. On the innovation side, there isn’t much difference between this and its predecessor, which in turn was a pastiche of genre luminaries.
Co-op is back for this sequel, though, and it’s just as fun as the last time. Having both sisters on screen at the same time heightens the already solid combat. Mixing gun, whip, and secondary attacks while dashing around the screen is fun and significantly decreases the game's more difficult sections.
