A-Men

I have a soft spot for games that refuse to apologize for what they are, and A-Men is upfront about its personality in a way most indie releases never manage. This is a character-swapping puzzle-platformer in the mold of Lost Vikings and Lemmings, built by Bloober Team before they pivoted to psychological horror, and it wears its old-school influences without irony. The setup is thin on purpose: a malfunctioning factory is churning out rogue A-Droid robots, and your squad of specialists needs to shut it down. The story is background noise. The puzzle design is the point. The cast of five controllable characters is the core of everything. A private handles rifle fire, grenades, and explosives. The engineer constructs and destroys structures, filling roughly the same role as the classic Lemmings builder. A commando brings a grappling hook and a parachute for navigating vertical space. A muscleman can hurl teammates up to otherwise unreachable platforms and shove heavy crates around or drop objects onto enemies below. Each character is drip-fed across the first half of the game's 40 levels, which is a smart pacing choice: by the time the full roster is available, you already understand how each piece slots into the puzzle logic. The satisfaction of lining up a solution using all five units in sequence is genuine, and the game earns those moments. The difficulty is where opinions split. A-Men makes no concession to patience. One-hit kills are standard. Mid-level save points exist but are sparse, and the game actually docks your score for using them, which is a design choice that tells you exactly who this was built for. The physics have been noted by multiple players as feeling slightly floaty, and there are moments where a death feels less like your mistake and more like the engine doing something unexpected. Trial-and-error is the intended loop here, but the line between satisfying repetition and grinding frustration is thin, and A-Men crosses it occasionally. Steam user reviews sit at mixed, which tracks: players who connect with this kind of uncompromising puzzle structure tend to stay for hours, while everyone else bounces off the first rough patch. The military march soundtrack does solid work keeping energy up during retry sessions, which is honestly exactly what that kind of score should do. For the right player, this is a quietly interesting artifact: a small game from a studio that would go on to much bigger things, still carrying the rough edges and stubborn charm of a team figuring out what kind of developer it wanted to be. It does not have the polish of a modern puzzle-platformer, and it is not trying to be one. If you find warmth in the memory of Lemmings and genuinely enjoy decoding a level through repeated attempts rather than built-in hints, A-Men holds up better than its obscurity suggests. Go in knowing the score: roughly nine hours of content, no difficulty options, and a game that will not meet you halfway.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on A-Men.