American Man

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Family Vacation Bundle / 20 Games, along with .cat Milk, Axolotl, Bruxa, CatCat, Cats Puzzle, Cooking Craze, Dinogotchi, Fire Race, Hidden Theft, Home Sweet Home, Kitten Island, Last Mage Survivors, Nincat, Rafa’s World, Rô, Scrap Bolts, Scribbled, Submarine Bubble, and The Great Battle of Shark Monkey Squirrel Dinossaur Bird Bee.)

American Man is an Action-Platformer released on Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game seems to be an imitation of the sort of Platformer we saw in the early games in the Contra series, complete with a Rambo-esque shirtless protagonist toting a machine gun, with players using that gun to shoot down hordes of animals that have been brainwashed to become enemy soldiers.

As laughably ridiculous as that premise sounds, the actual game itself does not live up to that absurdity. It simply means that the enemies shooting back at you are gorillas, bats, and snakes, and not anthropomorphic ones either. This is all depicted using a retro pixel art style that’s repetitive and far too simple to be nostalgic. Making things worse, the screen shakes a little with every bullet you fire, in a way that seems like it’s less to accentuate the power of your shots and more because there’s some bug in the code or something. It’s very irritating. And all of this is backed by a droning, repetitive synthesized soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the gameplay does not at all make up for this lacking presentation. The game doesn’t have any sort of introduction, and you’re attacked from the moment you leave the title screen, before you can even grow accustomed to the controls. You can apparently only attack horizontally or straight up, or jump, but can’t do both at the same time, meaning that enemies above and beneath you are far too difficult to hit.

This makes things particularly difficult early on when you encounter snake enemies that fire at you rapidly from a platform beneath the one you’re standing on, a place it’s apparently impossible to hit. The game doesn’t let you simply dodge past this either, as you’re also immediately attacked by flying bats that you can only take down by firing straight up as they’re bombing you. As a result, you will likely die a lot playing this game, and even more skilled players will have to admit this game’s difficulty curve is absolutely terrible.

Or, to put it more simply, American Man is just an all-around terrible game. It looks ugly, sounds bad, has terrible controls, bad level design, and a terrible difficulty curve. While the game’s premise is amusingly dumb, there’s no fun to be had here, dumb or otherwise. This game is painful to play. Skip it.

tl;dr – American Man is an Action-Platformer that seems inspired by the classic Contra games, with players taking the role of a muscular gun-toting Rambo-type character and shooting down a bunch of animals trying to kill you. Just about everything here is terrible, from the dull visuals and annoying sound to the bad controls, poor level design, and terrible difficulty curve. Do not play this game.

Grade: F

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