Ever wanted to play a gun-totin’ llama engaged in a war against the evil alpaca empire? Then this game is for you! Speedollama (pronounced Speed-o-llama) is a fast-paced 2D side scroller where you choose one of three distinct llamas and battle your way through nine worlds in order to defeat the evil alpacas.
So, when I first heard of this game and saw the screenshots, I honestly thought this was another Contra-style game and, normally, I’d be less than thrilled. But, after playing the amazing Iron Meat, I was more open to another Contra-style indie game. Well, that’s what I thought I was going to get with this game but boy was I wrong. Not only is Speedollama nowhere close to Contra, it’s more akin to those run-and-gun flash games from sites like Newgrounds and Shockwave. Which is not a bad thing, mind you, as I grew up playing many titles with this style of gameplay on those websites back in High School. In fact, if I could boil this game down to one sentence, it’d be ‘Easy To Play and Easy To Master’ which, again, is not a negative.
Once you choose what llama you’re going to control, each of the three have varying stats and looks to them, with Chris probably being my favorite just from his design alone, you spawn into the level and collect as many items as possible to unlock the end-gate, all the while blowing every enemy away with a decent selection of weapons, ranging from your basic machine gun to a laser rifle to a rocket launcher, though those and others are power-ups and last as long as you got ammo for them. While these are fun to use against the standard enemies, they are a necessity against the bosses and this leads to my first main issue with the game and that is the bosses are too bullet spongey. The first boss, alone, took me multiple tries to kill due to both the bullet-sponginess of the boss and how easy it is to get damaged by them.
That’s actually something about this game I find just a bit odd: The difficulty. While the levels themselves are surprisingly easy to play through, with dying only being an issue if the enemies do happen to get a lucky hit on you, the difficulty around the bosses is seemingly upped a bit. I’m not asking for the whole game to be easy or Contra levels of hard, I’m just asking for a bit of synergy between the levels building up to each boss encounter. It’s weird being able to breeze through levels without breaking a sweat, only to be blindsided by a boss before you had a chance to sneeze. Now, granted, the next boss was slightly easier, being a flying boss, but it still caught me off guard with the difficulty. Thankfully, you can alleviate some of these issues with the items you buy in the store either between levels or after you game over and these range from more health to a faster llama to more screen clearing grenades, the later being a huge help in some areas, though not against the bosses from what I was able to see. I do wish there was a proper health bar for the bosses, at times, it’s hard to determine if I’m close to destroying a boss. Yeah, you can see smoke coming out of the boss but, at times, I was less focused on that and more focused on just surviving.
Graphically, I do think it’s a decent looking game, with some well done pixel artwork throughout giving it this almost Metal Slug-esque look to it that I dig. The animations are well done, as well, with the death animations being surprisingly violent at times. Sound wise, the game is OK, with some decent sound effects and music throughout, though I will admit the voice-over guy’s voice is the only thing I’m not a fan of. I’m usually OK with these 80’s-style macho voices in games, but here it’s a bit on the ehhh side. It’s not bad or annoying, just meh’d.
Speedollama, while it’s not the pinnacle of amazing games, is still a fun title and I did enjoy my time playing it. I do see this style of game not being for everyone but I still say give it a chance. Plus, where else can you play a game where you play as llamas with guns? Outside of flash games and anything made on Roblox, I have no idea.
