Filled To The Brim With Jokes, Devoid Of Gameplay.
Jazzpunk presents itself as a parody of spy movies, but quickly wears out its welcome with never ending references and sight gags, most completely unrelated to the task at hand, leaving you with a thin vein of a plot to serve as a vehicle from one joke to the next.
That’s not to say all the humour is bad, but a lot is random for the sake of being random. There's no narrative hooks for many of the jokes, they just exist for the sole purpose of delivering a punchline; experience it and move on. Funnily enough, the better jokes are ones that are actually tied into the game plot, making the others feel tacked on and unnecessary filler.
There reigns the problem with the game; if you don't make an active effort to seek these jokes out, you'll miss most the content of the game (possibly without even meaning to) and probably finish the game within an hour. Even looking for them I finished at just shy of three hours, with the ending just kind of happening rather than being built up to. £9.99 for a game that feels like it was a student's spare time project seems rather hefty to me. At that price point, I'd rather just go watch a terrible blockbuster comedy, I'd probably enjoy it just as much.
The game gets split up into levels, which are small but distinct zones. Actually, scrap small, most are tiny. They look nice enough, but they're mainly just straight lines with a few offshoots if you want to go indulge in the humour, and there is no other reason to go explore. There's not much else to say about the game because, well, there's not much else to the game. There's a bunch of mini-games, though Wedding Qake repeats, which was a "ha ha, okay" the first time, a revisit of the joke was needless. You can swat flies in a vase shop, I avoided smashing the vases and killed the flies, the only effect was I now had a fly swatter, that had no influence outside that game room. I went back and smashed the vases, no effect. Sadly the gameplay part of the game seems like an inconvenience just getting in the way of the game telling its next joke.
Also, there's a Rita Repulsa gag (see power rangers circa 20 years ago). In a game released in 2014... Who's this aimed at again?
True, games like Wario Ware get by without much of a narrative, but it also just takes you immediately from one gag to the next, not leaving you to seek it out.
I do really like the aesthetics, the graphics, character design, the audio; it is actually a pleasant game to play from that point of view. It’s a shame it gets bogged down with trying to cram in as much 'humour' as possible at the expense of a more fleshed out main story arc.
This is the game equivalent of going to a forum for the sole purpose of looking at a random assortment of animated gifs; just a series of out-of-context punchlines.
I guess you might counter all this by saying it sounds like I bought a joke book and expected a novel, I guess that may be true to a certain extent. But I feel a more apt comparison is meeting a new group of people and having them telling all their in jokes and expecting you to laugh along with them without engaging in any actual conversation.
If you're just looking for humour, then honestly, Jazzpunk will deliver that, you may not like everything (I'll put myself in that camp), but the chances are you'll find something to laugh at. Just beware that most the gameplay is in service of jokes... and going and looking for more jokes... oh and there's a frogger inspired mini game.