After over a decade, GunZ: The Duel—a name that will do nothing for most but will certainly unlock memories of the most hardcore moments in online shooters for a select few—is back with GunZ: The Duel Remastered on Steam, and the hype is real. GunZ is a very simple game at first glance, but becomes infinitely complex once you dare look into the many layers of its frantic gameplay loop. It is a third-person shooter about anime-style avatars using the most shonen-worthy abilities, swords, and guns to kill each other in the most spectacular—and oftentimes confusing— manner imaginable, and it was a one-of-a-kind experience. GunZ is one of gaming’s most compelling phenomena. I was thrown into it over twenty years ago while visiting a friend who said I just had to try it. At that point, I had never read or heard anything about it anywhere, and it remained that way for most of the past twenty years. GunZ spread mostly via word of mouth: it’s a niche title by a Korean studio before those made it big in the West. The best way to explain GunZ is by explaining “K-Style.” It sits at the core of its gameplay, and its history shows you exactly what the community is like. It stands for “Korean Style”, which immediately lets you know it’s serious business. It heavily emphasises movement to prevent your character from getting hit and to enhance their killing capabilities by cancelling superfluous animations via inputting other animations. At the competitive level, most games nowadays feature instances of animation cancellation, but Gunz did so (and with a wide array of movement options) as far back as ’03. The GunZ wiki lists 17 different animation-cancellation moves, so the rabbit hole goes deep. On top of those, there’s wall-running, wall-jumping, many dashes, slashes, and many other elements that would later find mainstream popularity in the amazing Titanfall series. This means hitting the right shot won’t always net you the kill, and newcomers would constantly be baffled at their bullets never meeting the more experienced enemies. Mastery of K-Style gave players the ability to become nearly intangible at the right moments. Those using the technique quickly started to dominate the scene to a degree that some considered totally game-killing and even “morally wrong.” There was a case to be made there, as K-Style did indeed result from exploiting the game to hell and back. Still, this was such a hardcore community that, when the developers released a fix for K-Style, most players pushed back. The patch was rolled back, and K-Style became the true way to play the game. Starting out in GunZ is like entering a lobby where everyone else has the capabilities of your average single-player campaign speedrunner, and they all know you’re an NPC. GunZ is back from the dead, but at what cost? The official servers shut down in 2013, but its player base never let go. The community salvaged the game’s source code and kept a bunch of private servers going until GunZ was finally picked up again for the remaster. The good news is, the remaster is finally playable and offers many of the quality-of-life improvements you’d expect from a modern release. A popular YouTuber in the community, kadai, warns of a bunch of issues with its translation, supposed graphical improvements that actually harm the game’s performance, as well as with elements from the game’s original PVE modes getting cut. Still, it’s early for a final verdict on GunZ Remastered, and, with the community on its side, I’d expect it to make yet another comeback.The post The world’s most technical shooter is back from the dead, and it feels like a fever dream appeared first on Destructoid.