Only Way Up! Parkour Jump Simulator

Genre: 3D Platformer

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Midnight Works

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Review:

It is difficult to talk about Only Way Up! without first talking about Only Up!, a 3D Platformer released by SCKR Games in 2023 on PC, a game that had players jumping up a string of random objects suspended in mid-air, trying to get as high as they can without missing a jump and falling. This game apparently became popular with media influencers despite (or perhaps in part because of) its ramshackle slapped-together game design. However, unfortunately for SCKR Games, a mere four months later, the game was pulled from Steam due to its unauthorized use of copyrighted assets.

Only a month after Only Up! was gone, we saw the release of another game bearing the exact same title released to Steam by a different developer, MoreMoto games. Despite the identical title, this was an entirely different product, clearly designed to capitalize on the success and sudden removal of SCKR Games’ title, and filling the vacuum with a copycat game no doubt intended to fool prospective buyers into thinking it was the other game.

Released at roughly the same time in 2023, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch received Only Way Up! Parkour Jump Simulator from GameToTopCorp, a version of MoreMoto’s knockoff game that strips out some of that game’s features, such as multiplayer. I can only assume that GameToTopCorp and MoreMoto are either partners or the same company under different names, because the alternative is that GameToTopCorp actually released a bad knockoff of a bad knockoff.

Now, as I often say, it’s not necessarily a bad thing being a copycat, so long as you’re a good copycat, although my tolerance for this stretches to the breaking point when you actually try to steal the name of the thing you’re copying. However, that aside, that still leaves the question, how good is this game?

Much as with the game it’s derived from, Only Way Up! is pretty shoddily constructed out of various 3D objects in a handful of locales, with players themselves taking on the role of a guy in shorts and a tee shirt with a mop of blond hair on his head, looking a lot like media influencer Logan Paul. Given the viral nature of the game Only Way Up! is copying, it definitely seems possible that this design choice was deliberate.

While the visuals look like they were slapped together from an asset kit, the game still has numerous technical issues. There’s noticeable pop-in, and some nasty slowdown at times. This is all backed by an energetic but repetitive soundtrack that works well enough for the gameplay, but also seems slapped-together.

So that brings us to the gameplay, and here at least Only Way Up! manages to present players with something fairly enjoyable… at first. Planning your route through the floating debris, jumping from object to object, it’s clear there’s something enjoyable here… but then the game has to go and mess it all up.

You’ll probably first notice something is up when you inevitably miss a jump and fall back down to the ground. While the game does have regular checkpoints in the form of yellow helipads, there’s no quick and easy one-button way to return to the last checkpoint you reached. To use a check point, you have to pause the game, go into the menu, restart the level, wait through a somewhat long loading screen, and then the game will ask you if you want to start at the last checkpoint. All this for something that should have been instantaneous with the press of a button.

However, the second time you try this you’ll discover another problem – your use of checkpoints in this game are limited by expendable items the player has to purchase in an in-game shop using golden nuts (of the “nuts and bolts” variety) that are earned by reaching the aforementioned checkpoints. Power-ups are also expanded and re-acquired in this same way – use it and you’ll lose it for all subsequent play-throughs until you buy it again. There are also what appear to be permanent upgrades for purchase, though their price is so high that you’ll have to play this game for a while before you can get them. All of this seems to indicate these systems have been set up for predatory monetization, though this monetization hasn’t actually been incorporated into the game.

Another issue here is that the platforming is fun when it works, it often doesn’t work. Whenever you touch something in the game without your feet firmly hitting it from above, your character finds all their upward momentum arrested, stuck frozen in a jumping pose while hanging on the edge of the platform. It’s something that means any jump that isn’t perfect is often just plain bad. Even worse, sometimes the controls are not responsive to your inputs, and multiple times the game refused to have my character jump when I pressed the button to do so, resulting in him casually walking off the platform I was trying to jump from.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the level design here is also poorly thought-out. Early in the first level set in a city, the path splits into two branches, with one heading upward and the other heading in the direction of some buildings. The latter seems like it would be an ideal place to stash a hidden secret, or a shortcut… but instead, it’s just a dead end. Why even put that there, unless the developer just wanted to waste gamers’ time?

Like I said before, Only Way Up! isn’t without a few positive qualities, and I have to give credit that the core 3D Platformer gameplay concept here is decent… except I can’t give that credit to this game, because Only Way Up! stole its concept. And apart from that, all we’re left with is a shoddy mess of a game with broken gameplay and terrible design choices.

tl;dr – Only Way Up! is a 3D Platformer where players must work their way up a path of floating debris. It’s a decent concept, but it stole that concept from another similarly-named game, Only Up!, and everything else is a terrible mess of ugly graphics, poor performance, broken gameplay, and disastrously bad design choices.

Grade: D

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Winner:

Laziest Copycat – It was a close call between this game and the next runner-up, but frankly how could I not give this award to a game that is not just doing a miserable job trying to copy the gameplay of another game, but trying to copy that game’s name as well. Let me make this easy for you – if you are looking for Only Up on Nintendo Switch, you will only find terrible knockoff games, because Only Up was only made for the PC… and then removed from PC for copyright infringement. This game is actually worse than that.

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