Recent reviews by rowan

disclaimer: i did not finish this game (because i didn't have fun)

that being said, i don't think that invalidates my opinion. i've spent enough time on this game to know if its worth any more or not. i also want to say that i didn't get mad playing this game! i just genuinely have problems with how the game actually plays out, not issues with my own skill (?). i am only judging the game by the base content.


i typically enjoy games like this. i enjoyed beating getting over it, peaks of yore was a lot of fun (until the final mountain), and i have over 2000 hours tracked on geometry dash, i've spent easily hundreds of hours aim-training. i enjoy the struggle of improving at games.

so why's this one different for me?

well, i think that it (mainly) comes down to one big difference separating this game from all of the others: you can't react to your gameplay. what do i mean by that?

well, all of the games i mentioned (except jump king) all have the ability to react to your gameplay; you are in complete control.

• your crosshair misses the target (aim training)? micro-adjust onto the head before shooting.
  
• you mistimed your jump off of a rock (peaks of yore)? you could use crampons to break your falling momentum and grab back onto something to fix your mistake.
  
• even in getting over it--you could make a mistake, but if you know what you're doing, you could find something to latch your hammer onto instead of watching your progress crash and burn in front of your eyes.
  
• geometry dash, for the most part, has pretty one-dimensional gameplay, but it has something great that makes it actually enjoyable! visual indication of when to click--it allows you to not rely solely on muscle memory, and instead, look at the screen. even then, when flying with the ship gamemode, if you can tell that you're lower than you should be, you could hold click for a split-second longer to course-correct. being able to set checkpoints is also amazing; it makes games feel so much more fair.

in jump king, if you ♥♥♥♥ up, you can't save yourself. it's awfully punishing for a game that has NO indication of how far/high you're actually jumping. that essentially means that i didn't find jump king skillful.

when i was playing, i found that, yes, jumps got easier after a few falls, but my consistency with them would eventually plateau. why? well, because it's entirely muscle memory. obviously, for new jumps, you don't use muscle memory, but for any others, you could not be focused on the game, and be just as likely to clear a difficult jump as if you were focused.

i (also) found the game mind-numbingly boring to play. because the game doesn't actually require any focus, it doesn't use any of my attention. for probably about 3 of my 4.3 hours, i was listening to music; i could be completely unfocused on the game and be just as consistent as if i paused my music to focus more.

all you do in jump king is memorise positions to jump from and let your muscle memory work on how long to hold the spacebar down for. then, you hope that your brain was feeling generous enough that you jumped the right amount.

yes, i'm sure that this game gets more consistent, people wouldn't play it if it didn't. but, at the same time, i don't care! the game isn't fun to play, and the idea of sitting through just one more hour of this game makes me dread existing entirely. this game, essentially, feels less about mastery, and more about mindlessly playing until things click--i get that these two typically go hand-in-hand, but, to me, 'mastery' feels more like working hard and dedicating yourself to something, when jump king is more like a slog of sitting at your desk and staring at a screen until your eyes gloss over.

that being said, there's no way to improve the game without compromising the actual difficulty of it (if there is any real challenge). a visual indication, like a jump strength bar, would be amazing, and make the game FAR more consistent and enjoyable to play. however, it would also definitely make the game easier. the intention of the game was to be 'difficult', with the thought of fun gameplay coming far behind.

i know i'm reiterating, but i very much dislike calling the game 'difficult'. anyone could beat this just by playing it a lot, without really thinking about what they're doing; you can't do that with an actual skill, like piano, which would take a lot more focus and thought in your playing.


i'm not going to deny that the art style is fantastic--it looks really good, and isn't too obtrusive to how the game plays. i think it's really good, and i can tell that there's thought behind the colouring to make sure that the next place to jump to stands out from the rest of the environment.

that's about it for my praise of the game though; at the end of the day, there really isn't much to pick apart about a game as simplistic as this.

i don't want to dislike this game; i like the art style, but the enjoyability of it unfortunately feels like an afterthought, behind the desire to make as 'difficult' of a game as possible. the actual jumping mechanic feels too much like muscle memory and not enough like skill to pass off as a truly challenging and fair game to me.

at the end of the day, it's a personal gripe that i'm sure other people won't mind as much. but, as it stands, i wouldn't recommend this game.

i just recompleted getting over it; god, it was a lot more fun than this game. i've come to realise that it's not only the lack of complete control in your gameplay that makes jump king worse, but also the fact that the movement is so incredibly un-dynamic. getting over it feels different every single time you play it (up to a certain point obviously), where there are multiple ways you can tackle each jump. it's a lot more fun compared to the simplicity of jump king, and allows for not only a fun first experience, but a more replayable one as well.

as well as that, i realised that this game feels far too punishing. getting over it is actually very fair, and it chooses to teach new mechanics in a safe environment without a large risk of falling; jump king doesn't do this at all. in fact, for the wind section, i would say that the few screens just under it (which you fall to a lot), are the hardest screens in the game up to that point.

recommend the game even less now.

Muck.