Giant walking bullets with guns of their own were shooting smaller bullets. A massive collection of guns ranged from awe-inducingly cool to “what the heck were these devs on when they thought of all this crap?”

That is what I was met with when I installed “Enter the Gungeon” and booted it up for the first time. But what I was greeted with absolutely dazzled me.

I was expecting to get hit over the head with cringe-worthy gun-based jokes, bad mechanics and a lousy soundtrack.

Instead I found an instant masterpiece waiting for me.

The sprite work is some of the best I’ve ever seen, with emotive and detailed characters, playable and non-player character alike, being the standard for this bullet hell dungeon-crawler.

The shooting of guns feels weighty and creates a sensation of actual stress with bullets and animation happening all over the screen in multiple ways, while you are left to weave your way through it all and pay enough attention to shoot your enemies in the process.

Most shooters try to ignore that they are, in fact, shooters in everything aside from the gameplay, but “Enter the Gungeon” embraces it. Some guns are shaped like bullets and fire guns, which in turn fire their own bullets, for example.

The opening song embraces this, with the player being immediately greeted with a chorus singing the title word for word, egging the player on to follow the command and enter the Gungeon.

Throw in a dev team that’s still active to this day, putting out updates, and you have the recipe for an achievement among shooter games, and something that entices me back to the genre.

The puns that I expected to turn me off of this game weren’t even a detriment. They were, in fact, incredibly thoughtful and brought multiple smiles and laughs to my already humorous experience.

As far as single-player games go, this could instantly make its way onto my all-time favorites list, but the only problem I could find with the game came up when I tried to play co-op with a friend.

You can only play on one device with the use of an extra keyboard and mouse or a controller. No online game play can be achieved at all without an arduous process of installing multiple programs, adjusting your router and spoofing your way into a game with a fake game pad signal.

Of course, no game is without its imperfections, and as a big picture, “Enter the Gungeon” is still an amazing single player title that will no doubt be racking up my hours played in the future.