The Wild World of Flash Games: A Wolf Games Twofer
"Gunblood" and "Apple Shooter," developed and published by Wolf Games are as simple as they are effective. They're also hilariously violent.
Sometimes, the best Adobe Flash games are the ones with the simplest of premises. In a medium meant to either kill time at the office or goof around in a computer lab, simple games with satisfying graphics and easy-to-understand mechanics are arguably just as fun as their more technically complex counterparts. For a good example of this, let’s take a look back at a pair of games that take less than 10 minutes to complete, yet are endlessly fun to replay — even if I’m a decade older than when I first played them.
Today, we’re looking at a twofer developed and published by Wolf Games: Gunblood and Apple Shooter, a pair of games that need nothing more than a standard mouse to play. Though they share an identical control scheme, as well as similar gameplay, they’re endlessly entertaining to quickly run through again and again.
They’re also gloriously violent.
Replaying Gunblood
Have you ever wanted to live out your dreams as a rootin’ tootin’ gunslinger? Have you ever wanted to snuff the life out of those who oppose you? Why not have both?
Gunblood, originally released in 2016, is an incredibly straightforward dueling game wherein you choose one of ten colorful characters and battle your way through the remaining few, all while occasionally playing target shooting minigames in a handful of forms. Similar to the classic Western standoff trope, both characters start with their guns holstered, demanding that the mouse be tucked towards the bottom of the screen until you’re allowed to draw. When a countdown hits zero, it’s up to you to unholster your iron and fire off a volley of shots at your opponent.
The game doesn’t reward blind shooting, however. Using the mouse, you’ll have to quickly (and carefully) aim your revolver at specific regions of your opponent’s body. A shot to the leg will bring them down to one knee. A shot to the chest may knock them flat on their back. A blow to the head may kill them outright. The same applies to you, with any form of damage drastically affecting your aim. While some duels boil down to quickly unloading lead into your enemy, others may be an expedient battle of reflexes as you target whatever valuable body parts you can.
You’ll play through nine rounds of this, with each successive opponent boasting better reflexes and accuracy. You’ll be graded on your performance against each opponent, with your accuracy, speed, and remaining health factoring into a significant point bonus at the end of each round. Every few rounds, you’ll also enter a fun minigame that’ll net you a massive point bonus — or no points at all — depending on your performance. They all follow a simple formula: shoot a set amount of objects without hitting your assistant. Your total score can then be compared to other submitted scores, with support for dedicated friend groups to compare each other’s performance.
Is it high art? No, but there’s ample effort made in making Gunblood as fun as possible. Blood flies just about everywhere with every shot. Character animations are quick and snappy. Pieces of your opponent fly off in certain circumstances, allowing you to shoot their head off outright or simply riddle their body with holes. There’s a definitive weight behind each shot that makes the accompanying trips and falls feel all the more violent and visceral. It’s cartoony, but it works in the game’s favor.
There’s not much else going on visually. Yes, Gunblood has really nice-looking action, but the menus, the backgrounds, and the overall presentation comes off as more clinical and straightforward than sun-soaked and dusty. It may put off some. But I found that it was refreshingly focused. All that matters is the action directly in front of you, and I found the lack of distractions to be somewhat novel in an era where it’s more important than ever to stand out visually.
Replaying Apple Shooter
Apple Shooter is a lot more simple in comparison, both in terms of presentation and gameplay.
You’re tasked with launching an arrow into an apple precariously sitting on your assistant’s head. Should you succeed, you’ll have to repeat the process from a farther distance. Should you fail, he’ll die. Killing your assistant resets your accumulated distance. Short, sweet, and to the point.
Like Gunblood, most of the fun comes from how the game actually plays. The same kind of barebones presentation is here and accounted for, but instead of black gunpowder, you’ll rely on the tensile strength of a wooden bow. There’s a bit more skill involved here. You’re not under a strict time limit, and because you’re launching a far-slower projectile, you’ll have to more carefully adjust your aim with every shot. A single failure will send you all the way back to the start, after all, so it doesn’t hurt to play with a bit more caution.
It’s definitely easy to tell that Apple Shooter came first. At least, maybe it did. It seems like it did, but finding any tangible information about either one of these games is ludicrously difficult.
Who Is Andrew Wolf?
I don’t know. Really, I don’t. Andrew Wolf is credited as the sole programmer, artist, and animator for both Gunblood and Apple Shooter, yet I cannot for the life of me find any valuable information about who they are, or what they’ve done, or what they’ve been up to since. Though GameDeveloper featured Gunblood in one of their “Best of Indie Games” showcases, Wolf was mentioned only in passing.
Even the Internet Archive isn’t much help. Wolf’s website, wolfcom.ca, has seemingly shut down within the past few years. The latest snapshot from August 2022 reveals that the site mainly serves as a redirect to Wolf’s various games over the year, including the likes of Android Soccer, Samurai Fighters, and Dead Samurai. What’s more interesting, however, is that Gunblood has its own dedicated web page separate from wolfcom.ca, which seemingly exists just to host the game. Stranger still, the version found on this web page looks to have been successfully ported to HTML, with the game’s development being credited to Hippo HTML Games instead of Wolf Games.
Suffice to say, wherever Andrew Wolf may be, they’ve likely moved on from Adobe Flash. Their only social media presence I could find was a small user profile on Kongregate, whose last activity can be traced all the way back to 2016.
Still, if they’re somewhere out there, they ought to know that they made a fantastic series of Adobe Flash games. They’re one of the first authors I’ve found that were incredibly distinctive. I could look at a screenshot from one of their many games and immediately know who made it, either based on its identifiable visuals or its simple but effective mechanics. Every now and then, if I’m ever bored, I think back to simple games like these and what kind of impact they may have left on me — the violence wasn’t necessarily good for a developing mind, but the imagination that went into their creation certainly kick-started my own creative side.
Gunblood and Apple Shooter can both be played on Office Game Spot.