Gun Jam from Jaw Drop Games and Raw Fury is a rhythm-based shooter. We’ve seen a couple of titles in this genre in recent years so does this one innovate and bring more to the table?
Unfortunately, Gun Jam is what I’d like to call a completely wasted opportunity. What initially seemed like a fun rhythm-based game with multiple linear levels chock full of enemies, turned out to be a lacklustre arena shooter instead.
Gun Jam puts players in the shoes of one of 3 different characters. You can’t select your character unfortunately and have to play as the one assigned to the arena you choose and that’s that.
Diving right into the game, there’s barely any sort of tutorial or instructions. You just have to figure things out for yourself and unfortunately, this is not good at all for players. Some notes that scroll up are filled and others are left blank and there’s no real indication as to what this really does. It took some trial and error to realise that different coloured notes that are filled in will cause my playable character to swap weapons and shoot differently.
Being a rhythm game, I also expected the notes to follow the beats of a song but in Gun Jam, it does not. Instead, there’s just a music track playing in the background while beats flow upward and you’ll just have to make do with pressing your left mouse button at the right time based on that. It’s incredibly disappointing, to say the least and the developers really need to do some work on their beat map generation here.
Graphically, Gun Jam looks fine and has a vibrant colour palette and art style. The visuals are on-point so it’s even more disappointing to note that the gameplay itself is so lacking.
The soundtrack included in Gun Jam is varied with 10 tracks of various genres to keep you busy in the 4 levels but based on the game’s original demo, something changed here and the final product that we’ve been served is severely disappointing. Jaw Drop Games and Raw Fury need to overhaul this game if it’s to be saved because as it stands right now, Gun Jam is truly jammed up by its own lack of content.
In its current state Gun Jam is playable but it’s not a really enjoyable experience. Shooting enemies feels extremely slow and even dodging feels like a painful exercise in just waiting around for the beats to show up so you can actually deal some damage.
Mechanically, everything is already there and it just needs some fine-tuning to make it work. Developers, if you’re reading this right now, please take the community’s and my feedback seriously and give this game a hefty rework. We want it to be successful because it has potential but right now, it’s just an average shooter with a tagged-on beat mechanic that doesn’t really work as intended. Gun Jam in its current state does not get a recommendation from me.
Gun Jam Trailer
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