Retro: Nam game review

This review originally appeared on Reviewcenter.com in 1998.

By John Guilfoil

Nam is a 3D action game that sets you in the middle of the Vietnam War. Your war machine arsenal consists of the M60 machine gun, M79 grenade launcher, M16 rifles, flame-throwers, C4 plastic explosives, a sniper rifle and more.

You play a roughneck marine in the middle of the war with the aid of medics, soldiers and radiomen. The radios that you will find throughout the jungles and city levels will be most useful as they are used to call for air strikes! This was an exceptionally clever aspect of the game that adds to the realism and overall effect of the game.

The sound effects are excellent and seem to place you in the middle of the Academy Award-winning film Platoon (Best Picture, 1986).

The graphics and controls are exactly the same as Duke Nukem because Nam uses the Duke Nukem 3D “Build” engine.

There are 34 single and multi-player levels and the finale of the last campaign is an extraction of soldiers from the besieged city of Saigon at the very end of the war.

Overall, I recommend this game to all 3D gamers who are looking for something interesting, action-packed and different.

Editor’s note (10/12/07) – As I sit down to look over all these old articles and reviews from “the good old days” I realize that I used to go way too easy on video game developers. In fact, there’s a sporting chance that I was the only reviewer to give Nam a favorable writeup. But I was 10 years younger in 1998.

Between 1998-2000, GT Interactive Software was starting to slip away from relevance — Doom was six years ago and the Duke Nukem franchise entered into what would become the great video game boondoggle.

It wasn’t so much that Nam was a bad game — it just should have been released for $9.99 as a Duke Nukem 3D expansion pack — it was the best that could be done with the terrible Build engine. At the end of the day, Nam went down with the rest of the worthless tripe that GT put out before Infogrames bought them in 2001 and basically eliminated the brand. You know Infogrames today through its American brand: Atari.

Publisher: GT Interactive
Developer: GT Interactive
Platform: PC CD-ROM
Genre: 3D Action/Adventure
Players: 1 (limited multiplayer available)
Launch Date: 1998

Playability: [rating:4/5]
Learning Curve: [rating:4/5]
Sound: [rating:4/5]
Graphics: [rating:4/5]
Overall: [rating:4/5]