Gun Jam review: This gun is definitely jammed

A novel concept isn’t enough to keep this game from misfiring

Gun Jam is an idea. As an idea, as a concept, it has a lot of promise and sounds like something that would be completely my, uh, jam. It mixes FPS combat and movement with music rhythm sequencing. Point, shoot to the beat, defeat enemies.

It should be a slam dunk!

But instead it doesn’t go beyond that idea, that concept, that pitch. Gun Jam is stuck somewhere between the two genres it’s trying to combine, and doesn’t really succeed at either.

Visually it carries a great aesthetic, with high color saturation and contrast, explosive blasts of light, and almost a blaze of cartoon neon everywhere. It’s memorable, at least for the appearance. At least there’s that.

The music is great, too, albeit there aren’t a ton of tracks. The core concept is that we run around an arena defeating enemies, shooting along to the music. We’re supposed to time our shots and attacks to the beat to get the maximum effect of our damage. But, that’s where my traditional FPS mind takes over and things start to fall apart. In fps games we’re trained to take our shot as soon as the best opportunity becomes available. If it’s far away or up close, it doesn’t matter: take the shot, kill the enemy. It’s not that here. With Gun Jam we have to time our shots to the beat, sometimes waiting for the reticule to line up correctly on the rhythm track before we can tap. That means that we sometimes have an enemy RIGHT IN FRONT OF US before we are “supposed” to fire at them. And that doesn’t work out too well, at least in our experience.

In fact it’s easy to treat this like just another arena FPS game, and I did: running around, I would start firing at dudes as soon as I saw them, mostly not caring about that beat at all. And then, I would eventually die. Gun Jam punishes us for not hitting our shots to the beat, and gives enemies the ability to pounce and wear down our HP fairly quickly. We want to move fast and focus on the enemies but instead we need to focus on the music AND the enemies, AND try to make our way to some goal — there is a lot of juggling required, especially if we treat this like an existing genre. All of our FPS training is lost here, and we need to relearn everything to play correctly.

Ultimately, that’s where Gun Jam fails. While it has the elements of the a rhythm game and the genre backbone of an FPS, it doesn’t do well as either. I *want* to tap to the beat, and I *want* to take on enemies, but it treads a line balancing the necessities of the two genres without ever fulfilling them, and without sticking the landing on its promise.

It’s still just an idea.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy Jaw Drop Games & Raw Fury Games. This video originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on May 19, 2023.