Amagon Review

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a video game. You can’t argue with that. But what CAN you argue when it comes to this game? Lot’s of stuff. Things like, will it lead to world peace? Will it change your life? Is it good? I’m not totally sure the answer to all three of those is no. Or yes. It’s complicated.

Breaking norms right out of the gate the nice people over at Sammy made a video about not saving the world or a princess or beating up an evil doctor and his army of robots. Sammy decided that this game was going to be about saving yourself. Very metaphysical. Amagon, our plucky little be-shorted hero, is stranded on an island and needs to get across it to a boat to sail himself off to safety. See. Different.

Gameplay wise this game is weird. It’s a side scrolling platformer, which isn’t too weird. We run and jump and all that usual stuff. There’s a rifle that fires them bullets and we need to fire them bullets at various baddies all over the island. Most of the baddies are animal based like bats, birds, snakes, crabs, turtles, lions, other things… There’s also the dancing mushrooms from Fantasia. They make an appearance.

Your rifle takes bullets. No infinite ammo here. Enemies will often drop bullets, which is good because if you run out Amagon will instead take that firearm and turn it into a cudgel and try and brain his enemies. This is terrible. Don’t let yourself run out of ammo. It looks funny but his swings are wild and terrible and he misses a lot.

Amagon moves at a pretty brisk pace which is actually kind of a detriment as the enemies just zoom in from off screen and try and tackle you. Amagon, while ambitious, doesn’t have a lot of fortitude. You die in one hit. So that’s fun.

Sounds like Amagon doesn’t have a lot going for him, but he does have himself a super power. Upon collecting the proper power up with a simple press of a button Amagon can turn into MEGAGON!!! That sounds cool right? Right. First of all, Megagon is a tall, handsome, Tarzan/Fabio type fellow with a chin that could cut glass. He’s big, he’s buff, he’s got a health bar, he uppercuts everything, and he can even fire shockwaves. Which is nuts. He really breaks the game. But Megagon is only here for a limited time, he runs out of juice pretty quick.

The graphics are… interesting. The game doesn’t look BAD, really. Sammy isn’t a graphical or high budget powerhouse when it comes to game development. Nothing gets hidden in the background or lost in translation between the designer and your face, but nothing really looks good. In fact most of the things in the game look kind of goofy. I feel like it’s almost intentional though so I won’t dig into that too much.

Music, much like gameplay and graphics, is also kind of all over the place. A lot of the stage music is weird. The boss music is kind of terrible. The title screen music isn’t great. But, once again, Megagon comes in to save the day with literally some of the best music on the NES. For real. It’s an AMAZING track.

Overall this is a strange little game. It’s not bad… but it’s not great. It has a few highs, a few lows, and not a lot of in between. It’s goofy, it’s hard, it’s fun, it’s annoying, it’s weird, and it’s awesome.