You are Alan 'The Bear' Westmoreland, Marine Corps sergeant. The trouble starts on a deadly Viet Cong raid. Here the jungle is your battleground.
Your mission, survive.
NAM captures all of intensity and paranoia of jungle warfare. Fire-fights, ambushes, booby-traps, snipers, air-strikes, anti-...
True US military standard issue weapons and equipment; M60 Machine Gun, M79 Grenade Launcher, M16 Rifles, Flame-throwers, C4 Plastic Explosives, Mine detectors and much more...
First off I will say I do like the gun play and the level design isn't awful.
Other then that the game is a never ending cavalcade of insta, or near instadeath hell. Enemies cleave through your health like it isn't even there. Enemies can see and shoot you through sprites. The audio from Sniper fire isn't directional like other sounds making snipers near impossible to find. Not to mention the joy of mines and airstrikes. Most of the time I'm never even sure what killed me making the act of trying to learn the game incredibly unpleasant.
Had this game on a CD (still do actually). It's a relatively fun Duke-clone, but once the novelty wears off, it's actually kind of meh, annoying even: enemies attack you from behind bushes, and you die without knowing what hit you. Realistic 'NAM experience? Maybe, but not very fun for a video-game.
Level design could have been better, but it works. I did enjoy the new textures and whatnot. The guns are fun, there's a sniper rifle (something that Duke didn't have). For 'gear' you have some nifty items like Mine Detector (self-explanatory) and Heli-transport (not actual name, sorry; acts same way as Duke's Jetpack). Other stuff I don't remember.
Enemies come in only a handful of flavours, but even the weakest Viet Cong grunt can pack a punch. Additionally, there are traps to look out for, and some other things like air-bombings, and even a few vehicles.
A really interesting feature compared to other Duke-clones or Build Engine games is that in NAM you can recruit friendly marines to follow and help you in the shootouts. The marines also come with specializations, so one can heal you, one can look out for mines, etc. These ain't your Brutal Doom marines that just run around shooting, they're more like Half-Life: Opposing Force's marines, which is, pretty cool actually.
Oh yeah, the store description doesn't mention the fact that Alan Westmoreland (the player character) is not just your regular marine, but actually a CIA genetically-enhanced super-soldier. This doesn't make any difference gameplay-wise, but it's a fun piece of lore.
I read that originally, the game cost 20$, now it costs 5$ (at least in my region). If you want it, give it a shot, though personally, I'd wait for a sale.
Gave it a third star for the nostalgia.
If you can find this for $0.99 or less, I'd recommend getting it.
The enemy placement does make the gameplay tougher, often to the point of being quite unfair, but I'm damn old these days and will switch to god mode when I get sufficiently annoyed at continuously respawning, so it's not a big issue to me. However, I'd still say that the enemies actually are one of the better parts of the "game", as they do actually give it a bit of realism (and for the late 1990s, enemies pretending to be dead at first is kind of clever).
While the levels have some good bits (e.g. the boats, some of the more complex outdoor levels), they're mostly repetitive and boring, and the amount of "locked" doors that couldn't be opened in any case is rather annoying in the in-door levels.
The weapons are pretty much the best part of the game, and don't look half bad either.
The new character sprites have godawful faces (so much so that texture upscalers can't figure them out) and are otherwise rather average, repeated Duke Nukem 3D (some Shadow Warrior) assets really drive in the "this should have been a free TC" point - as do the "endings" which would actually have been even slightly better if they had been more akin to the slideshow summary ones that Wanton Destruction for Shadow Warrior had, instead of being more or less just big-font text blobs of "KONGRADULATIONS".
Nam really reminds me a lot of the Park TC for Shadow Warrior (especially w.r.t. confusing, wide, mostly unlit forests), except that Park is available for free for SW, was more or less made by one person and would rank higher than Nam if it had been a commercial release instead.
Nam is definitely a 1/5 joint - I'd have given it 3/5 stars if it had been a free TC for Duke3D instead - but it's definitely not worth the ~2 bucks I spent on it in the December 2024 sale.
Very rarely do I feel that a game has no redeeming qualities but this is one of those few cases. 'NAM is hard to the point of not even being fun; meaning, it is needlessly difficult. You die comically fast, which, I guess, was a design choice by the developer to show that you're just a regular guy, rather than some larger-than-life character like Duke Nukem. Still, this is an arcade-style shooter, not a mil-sim, so it's like the difficulty level doesn't match the game's style. If you get shot twice, maybe three times, you're done. Bombs are constantly being dropped by the US and you'll constantly be blown to bits by them. Land mines are...numerous, and, because of the horrid (for 1998) graphics, you cannot see them. You'll continually walk over them and get blown to kingdom come. You can quick save, but you'll have to do it so often, that it distracts from the fun. With this said, you'll be reloading quicksaves far more than you'll be making them. It's just tedium to the core. Long story short, this game sucks.
Have you ever wondered what the Vietnam war was like than this is the game for you. With widely unknown objectives, confusing situations and dying repeatedly from the most random and unknown of sources this game mimics the very real life of an American grunt post Tet 69. The game perfectly captures the quagmire that was the Vietnam war. You will die, a lot. From the most random of ways and places. That enemy you passed who was dead, surprise he’s alive. Not so friendly fire will smoke you frequently and in the most inappropriate of times. How about getting lost in the jungle and having no out? Yep, you will experience the frustration of a Lt. in a hot LZ who is hopelessly lost and has no idea where to go too. Maybe you’re looking for the experience of entering random villages and getting gunned down by people who look like innocent civilians, yep you can live that up too. Your one saving grace in this experience that a good old fashion corn fed Ohio boy didn’t have in 1969? An ability to save your game and get up and walk away from frustration.
If you were born post-Vietnam war and missed out on the excitement of being a drafty in America’s last not a war war, then load this gem up and get ready to shake your head and die a lot.
