While Konami may have borrowed a few choice elements from Gunstar Heroes when making Hard Corps, Media.vision swiped the entire package for Gunners Heaven, and the result is as shameless an imitation as possible. Like Gunstar, Gunners is a running-jumping-shooting game featuring two selectable characters, the blue-haired Axel Sonics and cutesy pink-clad heroine Ruka Hetfield, both capable of firing in eight directions, sliding, and grabbing overhead surfaces. Like Gunstar, Gunners pits players against massive mechanical bosses several times per stage. Like Gunstar, Gunners has a mine-cart chase and a free-floating shooter stage. And like Gunstar, Gunners aims to impress by cramming the screen with as much chaos as possible, including explosions, gunfire, and an endless line of dense and dutiful dog-faced soldiers.

That's Gunners Heaven.

And that's The Game That Gunners Heaven Copied.

Gunners isn't without some creative alterations, though. Instead of using a Gunstar-like array of mix-and-match firearms, Axel and Ruka each have four personalized weapons: a basic vulcan cannon, a homing laser, a spread gun, and a flamethrower. Each type of shot has a standard form and an enhanced variant, upgraded by “P” crystals from destroyed enemies. Said crystals fill a numerical gauge that's always counting down, requiring a constant supply of defeated foes. It's a clever twist on the usual power-up system, and the game never leaves you without an effective weapon as long as you keep moving forward. For some additional destructive flair, Axel and Ruka can grab a rarely seen “Boost” icon that briefly jacks any weapon up to ridiculously powerful levels. There's also a grappling tool that's fun in a completely useless way.

More importantly, the game captures one of Gunstar's finest points: the pure joy of blowing stuff up. At its start, Gunners Heaven is a manic run through easily destroyed legions of mecha, soldiers, and robotic creatures. Their attacks are straightforward and fairly predictable, but there's nothing tedious about blasting back a charge of canine-headed sentries or sweeping a jungle of robotic animals with gunfire. For its first two levels, Gunners is the sort of shooter one turns to for quick, thoughtless action-game gratification.

So it's disappointing when that reckless gunplay dies off during a lengthy convoy battle in the third stage. The taxing fight demands more pattern memorization than reflexes, and the game sticks with this formula for its two remaining levels. It brings to light the main problem of Gunners: the level design is unimpressive, and the stages are quite boring when you're forced to replay them time and time again just to get the sequences right. Even the bosses, a high point of Gunstar and other Treasure games, are pretty dull here. And without memory card support or passwords, the game must be finished in one eventually tedious sitting.

Gunners also lacks something one would expect in a Gunstar rip-off: a two-player mode. Hectic 2-D action games demand such a feature, and Gunners would have provided the perfect opportunity to improve on the life-sharing continue system that made Gunstar somewhat frustrating with two players. Sadly, Gunners is a solo act, and going it alone only makes the game's average structure more apparent.

There's no payoff outside of the gameplay, either. The slight story of Gunners Heaven has Axel and Ruka facing off against a squad of villains that includes such well-worn archetypes as the shirtless, mechanical-armed Barrows and the vain, leotard-clad female warrior Ash. There are only brief conversations between stages, with no ending to speak of. Still, the character designs have a quality that I'd classify as “attractively generic,” if such an adjective made any sense. The artwork is decent and most of the voices aren't bad, though I grew to detest Ruka by the game's end. Her wide-range flamethrower gives her an edge over Axel, but I regretted choosing her after a few cutscene antics.

Ruka also squeaks annoyingly every time she takes a hit. She takes a lot of hits.

In its defense, Gunners is aesthetically solid. The soundtrack's a respectable Gunstar imitation, and the game doesn't want for looks. Almost as visually impressive on the PlayStation as Gunstar was on the Genesis, Gunners packs in plenty of animation and flashy effects, and for all of the detailed character sprites that flood the screen, there's never any slowdown. It provides a good example of hand-drawn art done properly on the PlayStation, even if this old-fashioned approach sealed the game's fate as an obscurity. While Gunners was quietly released in Japan and Europe (where it was known as Rapid Reload), Sony's American branch ignored the game, as it did many 2-D titles in the PlayStation's first year.

I'm not sure if it was any great loss. Gunners Heaven may be competently crafted and fun in its looser moments, yet it's unremarkable, relevant only to devoted Gunstar fans desperate for a similar title. But in a world where Gunstar Heroes has few imitators, even a trite rip-off is a welcome sight. Gunners Heaven isn't original or important. It's just a halfway enjoyable action piece and a tribute to a classic that should be plagiarized a lot more often.

There's Axel on the cover of Gunners Heaven.

And there's Rudy Roughnight on the front of Wild Arms.

This wouldn't be the final appearance of Axel, either. He and Ruka showed up in Wild Arms 2 as the proprietors of a bar named, unsurprisingly, “Gunners Heaven.” Perhaps Media.vision, despite their insistence on making Wild Arms titles over and over, secretly wants to revive Gunners. I wouldn't complain if they did.