A guy wearing a power suit accompanied by three crude but otherwise effective robots fighting a guerrilla war against machines? The premise attracted me enough eight years ago, what with I being a Terminator fan. But only enough for me to consider a rental.
And a short rental it was. The game has many issues: rare (but still frustrating) crashes and lock-ups, weird graphical glitches, messy interface, obstacles in gameplay and most importantly, stunted story development.
With the story being the one that attracted me most, I found myself quite disappointed when the story was told in a disjointed manner, what with the very coincidental and hardly dramatic introduction of each of the playable characters in this game, up to the rather iffy and boggling ending. I should have inserted a spoiler warning at the start of this paragraph, but I would say this outright: don't play Gunlok if you are looking for a good story.
Tossing the story aside as a gimmick to get the player kicking machine butt with, well, machines of his/her own, the gameplay was quite interesting at first.
There is an inventory system that allows the player to gather lots of loot, especially ammo and other supplies and retain them as the player advances to the next stage - which was quite a rarity back in 2001 and was quite a b*tch to program right.
Then the messy interface ruined things. As the types and amounts of loot increases, the player will find that, despite some auto-arranging feature (items of about the same kind gets clumped together), navigating the menu of unnecessarily large icons in the inventory became a repetitive pain in the wrist and fingers. Fortunately, one can still pause the game and manipulate the inventory about, but this felt more like a glitch/exploit as by default, the inventory has to be managed in real-time (as also mentioned by the game).
The four characters (up to five very late into the game, but the fifth one was quite redundant, really) were supposed to have different abilities, but the differences only amount to contrasts in shape, size, color, movement speed, toughness and types of equipment that they can equip - which are rather rudimentary differences (even for 2001 games).
Speaking of equipment, Gunlok's supposedly advanced graphics (which mostly consist of quite awesome particle effects and lighting for that time) was hampered by lack of quality model design. Most enemies are designed using the same template, only with different sizes and color schemes, and which stank of laziness. The worst, most offensive graphical deficiency is the fact that weapons entirely replace the right hands of all player characters, including Gunlok himself (who, in fact, resembles a cyborg more than a human in a power suit, as the game states).
Enemy AI is of mixed quality. Enemy AI quite apparently uses the same template as those of the Commando games, where enemies react to disturbances and investigates. Alerted enemies also tend to alert others nearby, thus bringing a whole bunch of murderous robots on the player's head. Unfortunately, pathfinding is quite an issue to them and to the player characters as well. Models tend to get stuck on nooks and crannies, especially enemy models, what with their odd shapes, which then leads to rather cheap exploitation on the part of the player. Furthermore, enemies tend to simply get closer until they are right in front of their victims - and still try to get closer! In contrast, player characters simply stand their ground, firing away (so Gunlok, Elint and Hark are just as stupid as Frend).
All these drawbacks ruin an otherwise decent game.