I'm a huge fan of the classic Build Engine shooters such as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood, so I was surprised that I had never heard of Nam before it popped up on Steam. After playing through the singleplayer campaign, I now know why.
The basic shooting action of Nam is enjoyable and I had fun with the game overall, but unfortunately Nam falls into the trap of lazy production and bad game design too often to be considered a true classic. Like i said before, the shooting aspect of this game is solid. Enemies go down in one or two shots and the player character doesn't survive much more, which makes for some tense, thrilling shootouts when the game decides to play fair. The difficulty kind of reminded me Hotline Miami and this is definitely a game where you'll be save anytime you kill an enemy. What also impressed me is that even though this is an arcade shooter at heart and not really "realistic", the enemy placement does actually seem to conform with the tactics used by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. Usually enemies are hiding around corners or behind plants, meaning they can take you by surprise quite often and you'll oftentimes find yourself shooting blindly into the jungle to try and wipe out as many as you can before walking into their hands. It is these moments when Nam is at its most interesting, and the number of deaths you will go through during the game's 14 or so singleplayer levels will definitely drive home how effective the tactics the Viet Cong used in the Vietnam War were. Beating each level genuinely felt like an accomplishment and trying to get through without dying was an intense game of survival. There are really only three or four kinds of enemies (grunts, suicide bombers, tanks, and snipers), and while I usually rag on games for lack of enemy variety, I didn't feel like that was a detriment here, as the enemies the game does have provide more than enough challenge.
Unfortunately, Nam's moments of quality are severely hampered by some bad design decisions and lazy production choices. The main thing that drove me insane in this game were the landmines and airstrikes. Each level is littered with green landmines that blend with the grass. You generally won't see these until it's too late, so tossing some grenates or rockets into an area you're about to enter is advisable. I guess the landmines fit in with the theme of realistic Viet Cong tactics and again it does drive home how hard it would be to survive in such a situation, but from the standpoint of game design they just added cheap fake difficulty and didn't really do anything to make the combat more enjoyable. You'll also find yourself being driven insane by so-called "friendly" airstrikes. Throughout the levels, you can find radios to call in an airstrike on the area ahead, which is pretty cool and fun. Unfortunately, this game has tons of airstrikes that you don't call for and these can happen very quickly, giving you little time to take cover sometimes. The game also has a "bleeding" mechanic where you can gradually lose health over a period of time, but the bleeding doesn't seem to happen logically. When you get shot, you instantly lose health, but don't bleed. Instead, bleeding seems to be caused by bumping into certain walls and corners, and sometimes by jumping. The fact that the bleeding only seems to happen when your health is in single digits does not help things, and overall it makes for a pointless and annoying mechanic. Furthermore, some of the level designs employ some really bad game design choices. One of the levels near the end has a part where you need to drop down from a fall-damage inducing height not once, but twice in a row, and doesn't give you any compensation for it, which takes a massive chunk of health away from you and made the level unwinnable for me until I reloaded an earlier save where I had more health. With that said, when the levels were good, the shootouts were fun, but this game really does make some boneheaded mistakes that are detrimental to its enjoyment.
Furthermore, this game has lots of rough edges and parts where you can obviously see cut-corners and half-implemented ideas. Where other Build games such as Blood and Shadow Warrior had their own identity, this game constantly reminds you that it's basically a mod of Duke Nukem 3D. Lots of sprites and art assets are recycled from Duke, which is fine for some things like environmental textures, but then you've got the shotgun ammo box using the same bright-red sprite as it did in Duke, which doesn't fit in with the Vietnam theme and the general look of the game's new content. The game also uses Duke's grunts of pain when you get shot, which is jarring, as the newly recorded lines for this game's character sound nothing like Duke's voice. As for the new art assets, they really aren't that good, even by build engine standards. Duke, Shadow Warrior, and Blood all had beautiful sprites that make those games look great despite their age. This game (which came out 2 years after Duke) on the other hand looks like most of it was drawn in MS-Paint. The tanks are cartoony and have no presence in the world (previous games on this engine avoided this through skillfully detailed sprites), and while the Viet Cong enemies are reasonably detailed, American forces look downright amateur (although they're kind of cute in a goofy way). Also, the weapons are renders of cheap-looking 3D models and the weapon sprites really haven't been worked with to make them look particularly good in the engine. It might sound harsh to criticize a game from 1998 for its graphics, but compared to games that came out two years before (again, Duke 3D and the like), this game doesn't hold up. The environments aren't bad looking, but that's mainly because they reuse Duke 3D textures.
This game did try to add a few interesting things to the Build Engine formula, but unfortunately most of the new features are half-implemented or otherwise broken. One cool thing this game attempts is that it has NPC's who do things and sometimes talk to you. For the characters that give you the mission objectives, this works well, but once you start trying to use the combat NPC's, things fall apart. There's a medic you can talk to who heals you back to full health, and you can ask him to follow you, which is useful and he generally doesn't have any issues navigating flat terrain (although the NPC's can't jump, so they won't follow you through the whole level). Overall, the medic's pretty impressive, so he gets a pass. Next up is the gunner, and this is where everything falls apart. You can ask gunners to follow you around, so you would expect them to provide backup, but unfortunately they don't seem to actually shoot anything, making their entire existance pointless. Furthermore, there are only two or three levels that try to involve these NPCs beyond the briefing guy at the beginning of most levels, so the game really doesn't make use of its friendly NPCs (other than the medic) in any meaningful combat capacity. The game also peppers "Viet Cong Ammo" throughout several levels. You can't use it in your own guns, so for half the game, I was wondering what the point was. Then, in exactly one level, I came across a mounted gun that supposedly uses this ammo. I hit the use key and a message came up saying "you need Viet Cong Ammo to fire this gun", even though I literally just picked up some that was lying next to the gun. It's a mechanic that only actually shows up in one level despite being teased in several, only to not work when it does show up.
For all the ragging I've done on this game, I did have fun with it when the level design was good, and the bad parts don't destroy it. I wouldn't reccomend it as an introduction to 90's shooters, nor would I say it's worth $7, but if you've already beaten the Build classics and can get it for about $1.70 like I did, it's fun. It's not a classic, but it's not awful either.
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