There are four fundamental scoring mechanics in GUNHOUND:

• Defeat enemies and bosses during missions for bonus points. Keep an eye on the timer in the upper right-hand corner - when it drops to 00:00:00 and starts flashing, you can't score points this way until you reach the next area.
• Jettison undamaged armor for a 12,000 point purge bonus. Armor is replaced every mission, or if you continue.
• Special pickup items appear in both the missions and the simulator lessons:
  • Blue pickup items are found during missions and normally grant you 50,000 points if you collect them while your Gunhound is undamaged. Banshee Squad will drop one on the first mission, for example. These are very rare.
  • Simulator lessons contain medals that can be collected for bonus points. Silver medals are normally worth 10,000 points, and gold medals are normally worth 20,000 points.
• Bonuses are awarded if you complete the full game:
  • Continue bonus: 1,000,000 points for clearing the game without continuing. The more times you continue, the smaller this bonus becomes.
  • Special bonus: 1,000,000 points. I'm not sure what triggers this, but it always seems to show up.
  • No continue bonus: doubles your current subtotal score (game score + continue bonus + special bonus) if you clear the game without continuing.
  • Final stage clear bonus: 1,000,000 points. This is awarded by default.

Also, you can select "lightweight mode" in the Customize menu for a 2x multiplier on enemy/pickup bonuses, at the expense of your armor.

All points earned are accumulated to the total score counter in real-time. It's displayed on the main menu. The maximum value is 99,999,990.


Completing the full game without continuing will earn roughly 8,000,000 points and ideally takes about 30 minutes. This is not easy. Lightweight mode will bump that up to around 12,000,000. That's roughly 400,000 points per minute.
You can also choose to clear the final boss alone, selecting it from mission mode after you clear the game. This nets 600,000 points in lightweight mode and should take about a minute.

The most effective method I found was in simulator lesson 5, an auto-scrolling gauntlet. From the third platform you see, jump and fly to the floating platform on the right. There are 13 silver medals along a series of floating platforms, then a drop, then 10 gold medals along another series of floating platforms.
Afterwards, there's a fork where you can either try to make a difficult jump along a mine-infested ceiling, or reach a point that ends the auto-scroll where you can backtrack left to grab another 6 silver medals. If you speed up the dialogue at the beginning by holding down the fire button, it should take about 55 seconds to grab 780,000 points worth of medals (in lightweight mode, of course) and manually return to the simulation menu. If you make the jump, there's a section with square platforms over a instant-death pit with a few gold medals. It takes even longer to reach the equivalent score through that route. If medals appear more frequently after that, I wouldn't know - I can't survive that segment.

Anyway, at a rate of roughly 850,000 points per minute, you can reach 99,999,990 points in just about 2 hours.