JumpHead: Battle4Fun!

Genre: Platformer / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

JumpHead is a multiplayer-focused Platformer and Party Game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game has players in a single-screen Platforming arena where they compete to get the most points, generally by killing each other via jumping on the head.

The presentation in JumpHead feels extremely amateurish, with simple 2D cartoony visuals, energetic but not especially good music, and heavily-accented voicework for the announcer, and an overall lack of polish. At best, I could say this game’s presentation is playful and silly, but really there’s nothing here that’s all that compelling.

The core gameplay concept is sound, at least. There’s some fun gameplay to be found in the game’s competitive setup, and there’s a wide variety of different game modes and maps to shake things up.

Unfortunately, the controls here are pretty bad, inconsistent and at times unresponsive. In a game where your main form of input is jumping, it seems absurd that I find myself regularly pressing the jump button only for nothing to happen, or for my character to make the tiniest of jumps that barely gets him off the ground.

If JumpHead worked properly, it could be a fun little Party Game. Unfortunately, the busted controls leave this game feeling broken in ways that make it not very fun to play. If I can’t even reliably jump in a game that places such a high emphasis on jumping that the word “jump” is in the game’s title, you know someone messed up.

tl;dr – JumpHead is a multiplayer-focused Platformer and Party Game where players try to score points by jumping on each others’ heads. Unfortunately, jumping in this game is inconsistent and unreliable to the point where it saps the fun out of the game. This game is broken and not worth playing.

Grade: D+

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