Hear me out, I don't think that this game is overall that terrible. On a conceptual level it's quite faithful to the source material: classic movie locations got recreated (can't speak for the reboot as I never saw those movies), cartoony redesigns of both the original and reboot cast are included along with some random extra people, even the terribly smartphone-esque cardbased gameplay wouldn't have been bad if it wasn't the ONLY encounter type that the game could offer. The developers despite this desperately tried to give it s o m e variety within the (assumedly) extremely limited confines of the budget, so depending on some irrelevant variables, the locations either get flooded, overgrown or stampeded, giving some much needed dynamism....to the backgrounds while offering the exact same gameplay as before. There's also DLC content for this game which only offers a locale change and an extra character methinks also eventually the reboot got it's separate "campaign mode" as well which is once again the exact same gameplay except now it has a boss battle at the end which once again, presents the exact same gameplay without any major changes whatsoever. I sure said "exact same gameplay" a lot in this review, didn't I? What do I mean by that, you ask? Take a look at the dungeon-esque setup on the game's promotional materials. That's all the game is. For a wacky magical board game like Jumanji you'd expect some more "minigames" besides just one. You could have "last man standing" type chase sequences, score attack based rail shooter sections, a race against the stampeding animals perhaps or maybe playing hide and seek with the hunter? Please don't make me list all the cookiecutter minigame types that even Rayman 4's corpse has managed to execute properly back in 2006. You really needed more than this. No, game! Throwing 3 times the character and locale variety options at me as before will not automatically triple your replay value accordingly. You actually have to design some gameplay first. Such a shame too, the visuals and the atmosphere are definitely there, this really could have been something if the gameplay designer would have sat on his ass longer than 20 seconds. The only reason I'm not downvoting this is the fact that I got the complete edition for 2 euros total, a full price howewer is an absolute robbery for this. The game quite literally shows all of it's cards within the first hour of playtime, I only managed to reach the 2 hour mark by checking EVERY game mode and locale variable available and even then: TWO HOURS.

P.S.: I find it kind of amusing how the hunter is treated as some recurring game mechanic when I'm pretty sure that in the movie it was supposed to be nothing more than some Silent Hill-esque mindfhuckery directed specifically at Alan Parrish himself for abandoning his father the way he did. Goes to show what this game should have been. Not necessarily just a carbon copy adaptation of the source material as it tried to be, but an all out insane magical safari adventure with wacky shenanigans that given the creativity of the developers could have even expanded upon the movies' premise.

Too bad. Maybe some other time. :/