Short, but good!

EDIT: bumped it up to a 4 because this game actually has spirit, which many 3/5 games lack completely.

It always breaks my heart when I find a game that is clearly earnest, and has a lot of cute ideas to it, but ends up not being all that great gameplay-wise. Such is the case for Wampus. There's clearly a lot of love here, and the sheer amount of effort that went into making it run natively on the NES has gotta be respected, but unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty mid.

In Wampus, you play a member of the titular Wampus species, fighting against groups of alien settlers that are ravaging your home planet and killing your people. The premise may sound rather harrowing at first, but it is all treated in a rather comedic and light-hearted tone, which actually works really well. The writing, story and characters are some of my favorite things about this game.

As you travel through the world, you will find several NPCs and signs spread around, fleshing out the game's lore and world building, which is its strongest suit. It's not revolutionary or ground breaking, but it's fun and interesting enough to keep me engaged and wanting to see more.

Speaking of game world, the first hurdle the game trips over is precisely that: it is a top-down action-adventure, in the vein of something like the classic Zelda games, where you travel the overworld in search of dungeons, and defeat the bosses inside them. Except, unlike Zelda, Wampus is terribly linear.

Instead of exploring the world in search of information and treasure, the entire game feels like one long corridor with a few very short side-paths here and there. Not only does the game discourage backtracking, it outright prohibits it after certain points of no return.

Now, this may sound like a nitpick. After all, not every game needs to be like Zelda. My response to this is that, given the game's non-level-based structure and familiar top-down perspective, I was hoping for at least a bit more openness to it, but maybe that's just me.

The lack of exploration by itself does not matter too much if the primary gameplay loop is good, right? Well, the primary loop is not *bad*, it's just... simplistic and shallow.

It's a standard NES-era action adventure affair: fight enemies with simple AIs by shooting and using melee attacks. That's fine by itself, but Wampus does not evolve too much beyond "attack a handful of randomly moving enemies by standing in one place and spamming the shoot button."

I mean, eventually, some projectile shooting monsters get introduced, but even then, their attack patterns are rather simplistic and easy to avoid, doing little to add excitement to the gameplay. The boss fights are mostly pretty simplistic too, with a few interesting standouts here and there.

But having said that, I would definitely not say that Wampus is a *bad* game, just a very basic game with shallow gameplay. The highlight of the experience is the lore and world building, so make sure to read and talk to basically everything in the world when you play.

I'm actually looking forward to more games in this universe, even if this one was not all that fantastic.

EDIT: bumped it up to a 4 because this game actually has spirit, which many 3/5 games lack completely.

It always breaks my heart when I find a game that is clearly earnest, and has a lot of cute ideas to it, but ends up not being all that great gameplay-wise. Such is the case for Wampus. There's clearly a lot of love here, and the sheer amount of effort that went into making it run natively on the NES has gotta be respected, but unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty mid.

In Wampus, you play a member of the titular Wampus species, fighting against groups of alien settlers that are ravaging your home planet and killing your people. The premise may sound rather harrowing at first, but it is all treated in a rather comedic and light-hearted tone, which actually works really well. The writing, story and characters are some of my favorite things about this game.

As you travel through the world, you will find several NPCs and signs spread around, fleshing out the game's lore and world building, which is its strongest suit. It's not revolutionary or ground breaking, but it's fun and interesting enough to keep me engaged and wanting to see more.

Speaking of game world, the first hurdle the game trips over is precisely that: it is a top-down action-adventure, in the vein of something like the classic Zelda games, where you travel the overworld in search of dungeons, and defeat the bosses inside them. Except, unlike Zelda, Wampus is terribly linear.

Instead of exploring the world in search of information and treasure, the entire game feels like one long corridor with a few very short side-paths here and there. Not only does the game discourage backtracking, it outright prohibits it after certain points of no return.

Now, this may sound like a nitpick. After all, not every game needs to be like Zelda. My response to this is that, given the game's non-level-based structure and familiar top-down perspective, I was hoping for at least a bit more openness to it, but maybe that's just me.

The lack of exploration by itself does not matter too much if the primary gameplay loop is good, right? Well, the primary loop is not *bad*, it's just... simplistic and shallow.

It's a standard NES-era action adventure affair: fight enemies with simple AIs by shooting and using melee attacks. That's fine by itself, but Wampus does not evolve too much beyond "attack a handful of randomly moving enemies by standing in one place and spamming the shoot button."

I mean, eventually, some projectile shooting monsters get introduced, but even then, their attack patterns are rather simplistic and easy to avoid, doing little to add excitement to the gameplay. The boss fights are mostly pretty simplistic too, with a few interesting standouts here and there.

But having said that, I would definitely not say that Wampus is a *bad* game, just a very basic game with shallow gameplay. The highlight of the experience is the lore and world building, so make sure to read and talk to basically everything in the world when you play.

I'm actually looking forward to more games in this universe, even if this one was not all that fantastic.