Gun Jam is a rhythm-based FPS developed by Jaw Drop Games.
Gameplay has you locked in an arena for the length of a song, trying to survive as you shoot waves of enemies. Shooting, dashing, and melee attacks have to be done on specific beats, with the proper timing indicated by an icon reaching your crosshair, limiting when you can do those actions. You have no control over which weapon you fire, though the icon shows which weapon is coming up next. I thought this choice was going to lead to some unique mechanic or neat idea that required limiting weapon usage and when you can shoot, but it didn’t. It seems like a needless limitation just to make it different. This led to a few scenarios where I either had the prompts to shoot but didn’t see any enemies or had loads of enemies in front of me but could only shoot once a second or so.
The core gameplay idea is mostly solid, and features like aim assist and extending the time you can fire on the beat help those who need them. However, everything beyond the basics starts showcasing its flaws. Few enemy types make combat feel nearly the same every match. There are only four arenas, two with land-based enemies and two with mostly flying ones. While there are three characters, they’re each locked to a level, so their unique features, such as health and power moves, feel wasted.
I only enjoyed a few songs in the ten song soundtrack, but the main feature is importing your own music and blasting enemies to your favorite tunes. However, the shooting patterns it creates felt similar each time even though I tried it with a lot of different kinds of music.
While technical issues like respawning over a pit after falling into a different pit, finding an area of the level without collision, and poor indications of when you’ve been hit were minor annoyances, the growing list of quality-of-life issues really hurt my experience. The symbols and crosshair are tiny, making it hard to see when you need to hit them while surveying the arena for all of the enemies and projectiles, and you can’t adjust their size. There’s no tutorial, so you need to get a feeling for the timing and figure out how your powerup works on your own. You can’t organize your songs into albums or folders, making it one big list, and you can’t delete or edit custom songs from the list. You have to load each song individually. You can’t play a set number of songs in a row. After dying or beating a level, your only options are to restart the same level with the same song or go to the main menu.
While I had fun with Gun Jam for a few hours, its meager offerings make it feel like a solid proof of concept rather than a complete game. If you want a rhythm-based arena shooter that lets you blast enemies to your favorite songs, it might be worth playing. But if you want anything more than that, it will likely hit a flat note.
Gun Jam is available now for $19.99 on PC.
Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Gun Jam.
