(review might be a little laconic; backloggd glitched my initial review. summarizing from memory...)
JUMPGRID is a fun and addicting idea in theory, but fails to understand the strengths of both the games it draws from as well as its own self.
For this, I need to bring up its description of "bullet hell hyper-Pac-Man"; the second part of this couldn't be any less true. Pac-Man is a solved game that can be completed with a perfect score with some patterns and muscle memory, but this isn't the way it was designed: Pac-Man is a game that always shows players exactly what they need to know - nothing more, nothing less - and lets players not just react, but predict and plan based on that information.
JUMPGRID absolutely fails at this part of game design. It's understandable to an extent, given that its difficulty comes from the stage itself moving and changing form, as opposed to having enemies that move within the stage; but it also prohibits pausing without returning to the title screen, which makes taking your time to path the levels out impossible.
Which leads to trial and error - lots of trial and error.
JUMPGRID starts off great, with the difficulty just so that you can react to all the stages without too much trouble, but reacting at full speed to the later stages is almost impossible - especially when World 4 starts rotating the entire level, and your controls alongside it. This turns the JUMPGRID experience into a matter of dying, dying again until you figure out not only the angle of approach, but also manage to execute it perfectly.
This is also made additionally frustrating with the game speed option: 100%, the default, feels more like a speedrunner's option of max speed than it does an enjoyable first time experience. I can only recommend that later parts of the game be played at around 75% or lower - in fact, I would have preferred it if that was the 100% listed, and if the current 100% exceeded 100, or was designated as a speedrunning mode.
I don't really want to spend the time to find a way to integrate this point into the rest of the review, but I think being at a high graphical resolution also ultimately hurts the game. Hitboxes are overly precise, with literal pixels determining the difference between life or death. This one aspect makes the game even cheaper in my opinion, and makes it demand for more precision than I think it planned to.
JUMPGRID seems to actively choose to make its playing experience more tedious than it has to be - that, or it doesn't understand the considerations it should have made. I'll choose to believe the latter, but either way...
It's no Pac-Man.
JUMPGRID is a fun and addicting idea in theory, but fails to understand the strengths of both the games it draws from as well as its own self.
For this, I need to bring up its description of "bullet hell hyper-Pac-Man"; the second part of this couldn't be any less true. Pac-Man is a solved game that can be completed with a perfect score with some patterns and muscle memory, but this isn't the way it was designed: Pac-Man is a game that always shows players exactly what they need to know - nothing more, nothing less - and lets players not just react, but predict and plan based on that information.
JUMPGRID absolutely fails at this part of game design. It's understandable to an extent, given that its difficulty comes from the stage itself moving and changing form, as opposed to having enemies that move within the stage; but it also prohibits pausing without returning to the title screen, which makes taking your time to path the levels out impossible.
Which leads to trial and error - lots of trial and error.
JUMPGRID starts off great, with the difficulty just so that you can react to all the stages without too much trouble, but reacting at full speed to the later stages is almost impossible - especially when World 4 starts rotating the entire level, and your controls alongside it. This turns the JUMPGRID experience into a matter of dying, dying again until you figure out not only the angle of approach, but also manage to execute it perfectly.
This is also made additionally frustrating with the game speed option: 100%, the default, feels more like a speedrunner's option of max speed than it does an enjoyable first time experience. I can only recommend that later parts of the game be played at around 75% or lower - in fact, I would have preferred it if that was the 100% listed, and if the current 100% exceeded 100, or was designated as a speedrunning mode.
I don't really want to spend the time to find a way to integrate this point into the rest of the review, but I think being at a high graphical resolution also ultimately hurts the game. Hitboxes are overly precise, with literal pixels determining the difference between life or death. This one aspect makes the game even cheaper in my opinion, and makes it demand for more precision than I think it planned to.
JUMPGRID seems to actively choose to make its playing experience more tedious than it has to be - that, or it doesn't understand the considerations it should have made. I'll choose to believe the latter, but either way...
It's no Pac-Man.