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[360] Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley

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[360] Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley

Unread postby qweasdzse » 28 Mar 2011 20:38

Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley is Microsoft’s latest collaboration with the “independent” developer Twisted Pixel. The result is another excellent of example of an abysmal original XBLA game. It is an unimaginative side view action shooting game with a neutered difficulty and abhorrent graphics. Furthermore the game attempts to have a comedic theme without having even an ounce of wit, making for some of the most grating voice overs and dialogue in recent video game memory.

Comic Jumper is a very simple run and gun game. The character you control has one set of guns, the ability to jump, climb on pipes and a short distanced crouching dash. No power ups or extra weapons are made available. There is a shop where you can buy increased health and damage along with a screen clearing super move. The problem is that the only way to become fully upgraded is to grind for points by playing through levels repeatedly, a system that only really serves as a dull way of adding longevity to the game for obsessives. You won’t actually need any of these upgrades because the game is so easy and none of them really add any extra interesting layers to the game.

The stage design is boring. Half the time you will simply be moving through a featureless hallway while enemies run at you from the right and left sides of the screen. Even areas that differ from this pattern show barely any interesting design. The few set pieces in the game, like having to climb up a pipe while enemies shoot at you, are repeated verbatim at least three times throughout each stage . There are also rail shooting and auto-scrolling sections that manage to be even more simplistic and dull than the regular run and gun sections while suffering from the same problems. Boss design is also extremely weak. Each boss has around three or four attack patterns that they use interchangeably, none of these patterns being particularly interesting or challenging. They also take far to long to kill, to the point that you’ve seen all their attack patterns before you are even a third of the way through with clearing them. These problems are compounded by the stages having no sense of progression. Each stage feels the same as the last one, no interesting new designs or mechanics are ever introduced, the difficulty never changes and even the final boss is the same as the first boss give or take a couple of attacks.

Suffering through such a lack luster game could at least be mildly rewarding if the health and checkpoint systems weren’t so absurdly lenient. You have a health bar that allows you to take up to around fifteen weak hits before you die and even when you do die you respawn with full health losing less than a minute of progress. Even someone completely brain dead could run from check point to check point tanking through every hit and still make progress. Also because there is absolutely no way to gain health in any of the laboriously long stages even a fairly skilled player might eventually die, this ridiculous system encourages you to purposely die whenever you have low health at a checkpoint so that you can quickly respawn at full power.

The graphics look horribly dated for a 360 game and the art design sucks. Textures look rough and ugly and character and object models are simplistic. In keeping with the theme of the game, Comic Jumper has you play through stages that are designed after various comic book genres, the problem lies in how none of the artwork in the game manages to look like either a proper copy of these styles or even a witty caricature of them. As a result most characters look like ugly knockoffs of superior artwork. Some stages look completely washed out and all of them repeat backgrounds nearly constantly. Special mention goes out to the Manga themed world which attempts a black and white style while not providing the visual contrast you would see in a game like Madworld, instead the entire stage looks like a blur of homogenous grey.

Because the designers attempted to make the game into a parody of comics, the characters constantly spout off fourth wall breaking dialogue and witless references. The in game dialogue is a constant annoyance, from a character telling you how much you suck every time you lose health to the pointless conversations that the main characters have during every single section of the game. The game is inescapably and obnoxiously unfunny. All this, combined with every other glaring flaw, have resulted in a game that is a completely unworthy of anyone’s time.

*
Last edited by qweasdzse on 18 Jul 2011 23:41, edited 4 times in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Mar 2011 16:54

Seems like a decent review (but then again I only read the first paragraph).

Why doesn't someone try to play the game a bit and comment on the review? I really am not able to deal with this stuff right now, guys, so perhaps you can help each other out?
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Unread postby kingofcrusher » 01 Apr 2011 07:33

I enjoyed the humor, but the rest of the criticisms are accurate.
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Unread postby icycalm » 03 Dec 2011 19:50

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