Comic Jumper

 Note: Originally posted at  http://www.thegamingvault.com/2010/10/review-comic-jumper/

 Genre: Platformer/Shooter | Developer: Twisted Pixel | Publisher: Twisted Pixel/Microsoft Game Studios | Platform: Xbox Live Marketplace | Players: 1 | Rating: T (Teen)

I love Comic Jumper. I hate Comic Jumper.

I love Comic Jumper. It has such great style and charm, it’s deliciously crazy, and it can be extremely witty. While the humor starts off really broad and a little off-putting, I soon found myself snickering at many well-timed references and jokes. The main characters, Captain Smiley and his sidekick-slash-chest-symbol Star, also start off obnoxious and un-relatable in the first level, where you play through an issue of the Captain Smiley comic book.

As it turns out, this is totally the point, as this causes the comic book to be cancelled, and Captain Smiley is without a job. This is conveyed by a live-action FMV of kids throwing the comic book to the ground and kicking dirt on it, people using it as toilet paper, and so on. You then see Twisted Pixel, the developer of Comic Jumper, eye the comic with interest, and they decide to hire Captain Smiley to have him guest star in other comic books. Let me reiterate that; the developers of the game hire the protagonist, and they communicate with him and everything. Crazy.

So in order to earn his fans back, Captain Smiley has to guest star in three different comic books. The first one is the sword-and-sandal serial Nanoc the Obliviator, with it’s jungle temples, scantily clad concubines and… golf carts? Next is the Silver Age comic, where your sound effects suddenly are visibile, and you somehow traverse space with only a half-helmet. The final part is a shoujo manga world, where everything is in grey-scale, and… well, things get really weird, really fast.

I don’t want to sit here and tell you about all the funny bits, because where the game really shines is in the small jabs to whatever it’s parodying. Like for example, every time Star swears in the silver age, you get fined by the equivalent to the Comics Code Authority; or that in the manga, you side-scroll from right to left. Every time I thought I knew where the game was going, it served me either a clever new nugget, or just something completely absurd.

I hate Comic Jumper. It is one of the most tedious, frustrating gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time. For the majority of the game, it controls like a twin-stick shooter, except unlike normal twin-stick shooters, you are neither a space-ship nor looking from a top-down perspective. Instead, it’s a side-scrolling platformer, so if you want to move vertically, you have to use your jump button.

This becomes a problem because the screen will quickly fill with enemies both shooting and running at you, and unless you spend all your money on damage upgrades, they are all bullet sponges, and you have to spend significant time shooting each one while dodging a million things at once. And if you’re like me, you wont have money to spend on damage, because you are spending it all on the health upgrades so that you maybe, possibly wont die all. the. time.

The game is fairly good about checkpointing you, but I suspect that is only because it already knows you will die over and over again. And as if to taunt you, the game will tell you that if you get through a specific section without getting hit, you get bonus money. That’s like making the Death Star trench run, except instead of the Force to guide you, there are like five additional Darth Vaders shooting at you from every angle with projectiles and beams. There is a Han Solo button, but you have to earn uses of it through different sections or by using your hard-earned upgrade money to get them.

When you’re not going side-ways and shooting, you’re either in a melee section, which controls identically, except your guns are replaced by… well, your guns; or you’re in a Panzer Dragoon-ish mode where Captain Smiley is automatically running forward in 3D space, while you control his horizontal movement and jumping. The problem now is that suddenly the reticule does not snap to where you are pointing the right stick, so I found myself having to re-adjust the way I thought about the game every time it switched between the two shooting modes.

So that’s the dichotomy of Comic Jumper. On the one hand there’s the clever and engaging narrative, the delightful absurdity, the spot-on parodies. But then there’s the part where you actually have to play the game. The hair-pullingly frustrating part. When I had finished it, I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of it. I then realized that I kept coming back to the game very often, and ended up finishing it pretty soon after it came out. So clearly, the writing and gags were enough of a reason for me to play through it in it’s entirety. (Note that this was not an assigned review, so I had no obligation to finish it.)

I almost wish I could give this game two scores. That’s how divided my feelings are on this game. However, that’s not an option. So after considering it, I came to the conclusion that for me, at least, the reward outweighed the cost. I recommend this game to people who are patient enough to play through the annoying parts to get to some really satisfying pay-offs. Maybe you should stear clear if you are not a comics nerd like me, or if you dislike the absurdity of Twisted Pixel’s previous games like ‘Splosion Man and The Maw. However, if you enjoy either of these things, you might want to take a look at Comic Jumper.  

Final Thought: How on earth did they manage to pull off a successful Ghostbusters and Splosion Man reference at the same time?!