Jump King (PlayStation 4) Review

Jump King begins, and the hero is greeted by an old man who claims that there's a smoking hot babe at the top. The valiant knight just got all the necessary incentive to start his journey upwards, and what a journey that will be! Do things correctly, and you'll reach the finishing line in less than 10 minutes, but it's almost impossible to do so, especially in your first couple (or hundred) of tries. The main reason is none other than the way the knight controls. While in any other platformer you would just push X to jump, here you basically propel, or catapult the protagonist.

This needs some getting used to. For starters, there's no indication, visual or otherwise, of how long you need to press the jump button before letting go, thus the most common result of that is the player over/undershooting a leap, usually falling down and losing quite a bit of progress - and that is simply not very enjoyable. On one hand you have a level design that's extremely strict, with no room for failure, and on the other hand you have an annoying control scheme that you need to learn to "feel," with no way to alter your trajectory once thrown up.

Weirdly enough, this can be quite entertaining, addictive even, but as you move closer to the top you begin to notice more flaws. One of them is that the whole game is one level. This might sound like nitpicking, but it really hurts the experience, because it makes what is a repetitive game even more repetitive, whereas a campaign divided between a series of - thematically different - levels would probably help in softening the blow. The worst thing in Jump King, however, has to be how it punishes failure.

Missed a platform? Then there's a pretty big chance of falling to a lower part of the map... which occasionally means going back two or three screens... which also means that missing your step there can lead to even more progress lost. Long story short, Jump King will break you, and not in that "I'm being tortured and a like it" way of games like, say, Cuphead. This just isn't fun, and like a great deal of super-challenging indie titles, it strongly feels like a game aimed at [enter name of YouTuber with annoying voice], and the ones who enjoy those kind of videos.