Charming, but flawed
ZAMN comes with a fun retro-scifi aesthetic and some LucasArts style in-jokes. The core gameplay is fun enough as well and a multiplayer option is welcome to see. However below the charming exterior, the game has numerous deep flaws, chief among them is the completely unforgiving difficulty caused by the item management.
At the core, the item management does make some sense, you have numerous enemy types along with matching items that the enemies are weak against. Finding out what works against what is an interesting challenge in the early parts (or can be looked up in the manual). The problem comes with the amount of items one gets over the course of the game and the enemy variety that gets thrown at the player, which necessitates frequent switching. Switching is however limited to a single button and only goes in one direction, so picking the right item often requires a good ten presses to cycle through them, which in turn leads to a lot of miss-selection in the heat of the moment. Different enemy types also often appear together, so even preselecting the right item doesn't really work. Another issue is that the amount of items you have is limited and can't be easily refreshed, so running out of items next to a monster that requires said item can happen frequently. Those monsters can still be defeated with other weapons, but turn into complete bullet sponges. There is also an absence of any indicator that tells how much damage a given weapon is dealing.
The password that is issued every four levels doesn't help much with the difficulty either, as starting the game from a password means you start with no items, which can make the game nearly impossible to progress. While going through the game in one go is extremely impractical due to it's length of about 8 hours.
The game also features many other unfair elements, potions and chests with random effects that can hurt you, neighbors that can get killed before you even had a change to collect them, bosses that move far to fast to dodge them and don't really follow much of a pattern. The top-down perspective also leads to situations of getting hung up in the geometry, as it's not always clear what's walkable terrain and what isn't.
While the first half of the game offers a reasonable amount of novelty, the game pretty much runs out of it after that and later levels largely feel like repeats of things that came earlier.
Overall it's not a bad game, but it feels like it's missed the mark by quite a bit and isn't up to LucasArts quality, even so the charm is there in a few places. A quicker way to select items would have helped. And the structure of the game would have lend itself to a having a more mission oriented level design, but collecting all the neighbors is the only thing you'll ever do, without much cleverness behind it. There are no items that are specific to a given level or puzzles to solve, it remains a top-down arcade game with a lot of items to toggle through.
With an emulator and save states there is still some joy to be had, preferable in small doses, but even with that the game gets a bit tedious and repetitious towards the end, as there is no story or progression to keep things interesting. The game structure is just a linear collection of levels, not even the level setting has a progression to it, as the game switches between settings at random.
