Thank you Raw Fury for sending us a review code!

Gun Jam is a new open beta Steam release by Jaw Drop Games. It promises to be a cross between a first-person shooter and a rhythm game. Unfortunately, this “rhythm-shooter” falls flat in its poor execution and lack of content.

The main gimmick of Gun Jam is that your actions rely on a series of notes. You can fire your gun with a left click, perform a dash with a right click, and kick with the F key, but only to the notes of the song. The color of the note determines what kind of shot you fire: blue notes correspond with lasers; yellow notes with shotgun bursts; purple notes with quick, repeating shots; and red notes with explosions. As with all rhythm games, the better your timing, the more points you get (though your score isn’t permanently recorded).

After enough time, you’ll build up an Overdrive meter that you can activate. Its function is determined by the stage. It can allow you to deal extra damage, charge into enemies, or slow down time.

Turning an FPS into a rhythm game would be a neat concept if it was designed properly. In its current state, the beatmaps (the series of notes you have to shoot to) are almost never accurate to the songs and instead seem random and arbitrary. I also found it very difficult to focus on shooting enemies, hitting notes, and dodging enemy attacks at the same time, but I will chalk that up to my own lack of skill, rather than an actual flaw.

There are two modes available: Arena and Checkpoint. In Arena, which is playable on three stages, you simply must survive an onslaught of enemies to get as many points as possible. The round ends either when you run out of health or when the song ends. Unfortunately, this mode became stale very quickly. The three stages are nothing special—one is a mostly flat arena with a raised outer section, one is a small city with a few buildings to jump across, and one is made up of many multi-leveled platforms.

In Checkpoint, you traverse various corridors, having to defeat every enemy to progress to the next room. There is a time limit that only increases by clearing rooms, forcing you to be relatively quick in defeating enemies. This mode, despite being playable only on one stage, held my interest longer than Arena, but it seems unfinished. Eventually, I would get to a point where it seems like I can no longer damage an enemy to progress. When the song ends in this mode, rather than looping, notes just stop appearing and enemies stop moving.

You can play any song on any stage. The 10 songs you can choose from include the genres of trap hop, EDM, metal, and fusion. Amazingly, I found none of these songs to be memorable, and the many songs filled with constant screaming felt like an assault on my ears. On the bright side, you can use any MP3, OOG, WAV, or FLAC files as custom songs. The beatmaps for custom songs are automatically generated, though like the official songs, they rarely match the actual rhythm of the song.

The visuals are not particularly memorable, but they fit Gun Jam’s musical theme. The stage elements and some of the enemies’ armor are made up of boomboxes.

Unfortunately, that is it for the open beta of Gun Jam. $19.99 will get you a first-person shooter with a rhythm mechanic that seldom lines up with the music, two modes (one that quickly becomes stale and another that feels unfinished), four stages that don’t stand out, and music that ranges from forgettable to horribly grating. The developers have stated that they intend to improve the beatmap issues and add more stages, but for its cost, Gun Jam’s current state is an embarrassment.

-Tyler Ferguson