Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Game Review

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is an 8 bit, 2D, adventure shooter game by Sparsevector, an independent game developer. This game is a spin-off of the popular Oregon Trail and turns it into a randomized event, shooter game.

When you start the game, you are given a few different options, start your adventure, survival, shuffle, options, and quit.

Start your Adventure is the story mode. It starts you off being able to customize and name your three party members and choose from a number of different wagons. However, until you unlock the other wagons doing various events in game, the only one available is the standard wagon; which starts you off with full health on all three characters and a standard pistol. Each wagon has different health starts, guns, and even speeds and appearances. Every game has a basic outline of events that will happen when, such as running into rivers and the plains but the events that happen during these major points are randomized from picking berries and running into bears, to launching into space and shooting meteors, and even fighting off zombies.

Survival mode is a mode that is unlocked until you live through a survival event during the game. For example, one survival event in the story mode is surviving through a bear and rabid squirrel attack. Once you have survived it during story mode you will then unlock that event in survival mode. In survival mode you will have to try to survive the attack as long as you can as it times you. Survive one minute - one star, two minutes - two stars, three minutes - three stars. Once you have unlocked all of the survival levels and earned three stars, you will unlock another wagon to use in story mode.

Shuffle mode is a mode unlocked after beating the game. It is a mode in which shuffles every possible event in game and you try to survive as many events as you can. Reaching 50 events unlocks another wagon.

Options and quit are self explanatory. Options will give you text speed and even slight graphic options and quit will exit the program.

I stumbled across this game one day while I happened to be video browsing on YouTube. Of course, with a name like Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, I clicked on it out of sheer curiosity. My first impression of it was it was absolutely hilariously random. I have always enjoyed Oregon Trail, and grew up playing a few of the old versions and I was intrigued by a new game that had spun off of it. After watching a game-play video and seeing some of the random levels it had to offer, I ended up buying the game and giving it a shot.

So I played the game and it started off much like an Oregon Trail game started out - go hunting to get supplies for the trip. In this game, however, you stay in the wagon moving forward (left on the screen) while shooting animals that are running from you and collecting the pelts they leave behind - which acts as a sort of currency. However, shortly after I had started hunting, I was attacked by bandits. I thought, maybe not so unlikely on the trail and continued to shoot the bandits who were running ahead of the wagon and shooting back at me. After beating a few little waves of bandits the bandit boss showed up with a machine gun and promptly killed me.

I continued to try again and again, getting a little better and able to see more and more of the game and the random events. For being a fairly simple 8 Bit linear game, I found it quite challenging. It wasn't something I could beat in a sitting and actually found quite a few of the events difficult. However, it is highly addicting and the completely random and unexpected events are entertaining and enjoyable. I have since, with the help of my boyfriend, beaten the game once and unlocked a few wagons and all of the survival modes - though I only have two of the survival modes beaten with three starts. Months later I still find this game amusing to play and have recommended it to many of my friends. I recommend this game because of it's simplicity and its play-ability. There are so many random events that playing through the story mode doesn't get old and challenging enough that you do actually have to work at beating all of the levels. Not to mention this game is very cheap, a dollar or two, which I find worth it for how entertaining the game is.

Like I said before, this game is relatively simple and if you are looking for an immersing story driven game where you work to progress through a story, saving your progress, ect... this is not that kind of game. It very much reminds me of an arcade game as the story mode goes by rather quickly, even if you make it all of the way to Oregon.

This game is also challenging. Despite the simple 8 bit style, each level has some degree of difficulty and there are still events that I haven't been able to beat. In fact me personally, while I find the game a blast to watch and play, haven't been able to unlock much of anything on my own and had a lot of help from my boyfriend. It gets a bit frustrating how often you die and while some of the unlockable wagons are stronger and make the game slightly easier, I still have a difficult time through many of the events.

This game is also currently only available for PC. I have almost all MAC products so finding a way to run the game was kind of a pain for me personally and had I not had a computer that was duel booted, I doubt I would have been able to play. I am also unsure if the creator or anyone else ever plan to make it automatically compatible with other operating systems.

The text in the game, being in the 8 bit style, is a little difficult to read, and having little control over how much time you have to read it, you might not be able to catch what is being announced for each scene. Given this wont really affect your game play so much, though the text does announce what event is about to happen or if someone in your party dies, or gets sick etc... This may not be the end of the world but it does make it frustrating sometimes when I miss something the text announces.

I do recommend this game as it offers hours of amusing, random, and funny game play for only a couple dollars. It is an easy game to get up playing and addicting trying to unlock all of the wagons.

For PC this games is available off of Desura or GamersGate.

This Game is Also available for Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.