As we play offers the thought strands of the reviewer as they’re going through the game. This offers unique content for the reader so they can come to understand the conflicting feelings of the reviewer as they’re playing a game for the very first time. All feedback on this concept is welcome.
Jazzpunk is billed as a first person adventure game, although with its focus on exploration and almost total lack of any actual puzzles, it’s actually structurally closer to such interactive fictions as The Stanley Parable or Gone Home than, say, Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games. In fact, with it’s uniformly stylized population, surreal spy adventures and utterly bizarre but extremely colorful world, you might find that the game is quite similar in style, if not in execution, to Brendon Chung’s freeware classic, Gravity Bone.
In Jazzpunk you play as a secret agent known only as Polyblank and are tasked with a series of missions in an comedic and cartoonish alternate reality, cold-war cyberpunk setting. While the central missions themselves are short, there’s a lot more content to be found from wandering around the game’s various, chaotic stages than can be found through simply completing the game, and the player is encouraged to go as off-course as possible through the carrots of hidden jokes, unexpected sidequests that have nothing to do with the rest of the game and achievements awarded for the completion of surreal setpieces and minigames. There’s no real challenge to the game, with the puzzles generally being reasonably logical or convenient to solve, and so the player is basically allowed to lean back and just enjoy the tidal wave of jokes being spouted out on their screen.
The world is interestingly realised, utilising one of the most unique aesthetics in modern gaming. The combination of chunky, simplistic textures wrapped around simplistic low-poly structures and colourful two-dimensional scenery results in a garish but inviting environment, and the chaotic and heavily populated layouts create the implication of a larger world. It’s sometimes a little harsh on the eyes, but it makes sense for a game with punk sensibilities to be actively grotesque from time to time. The game’s handful settings are also excellently diverse, taking players between sunny parks, Blade-Runneresque Asian-styled backstreets, a massive Pacific Island hotel, inside a computer system and finally to a penthouse structure located atop a series of massively tall skyscrapers. Annoyingly, the player is often kept inside areas using waist-high walls which would otherwise be jumpable, breaking the illusion a little, but otherwise the levels are reasonably expansive and well-designed.
The humour, however, is not particularly well-defined. More jokes miss than hit, there’s far too much randomness for randomness’ own sake and the game’s sense of outlandish cartoonishness is too murkily defined for many of the more unusual events to be much of a surprise to the player. Certainly there are moments of comedic gold hidden within the game’s many layers of pastiche, but for the most part, Jazzpunk screams ‘look at me, I’m funny! Pop culture reference! Metajoke!’ rather than actually providing any real meat for the player to get into. It’s hardly Friedberg and Seltzer levels of unfunny, but when you’re aiming for The Naked Gun and end up at Jazzpunk, it’s hard not to see some serious flaws in the finished product’s writing and presentation.
It should also be noted that the game seems to lack female characters that aren’t either giggling bimbos, secretaries, or glorified servants. While there are piles and piles of bizarre and memorable male characters including eccentric billionaires, crazed conspiracy theorists, technologically advanced homeless people and an utterly wonderfully British antagonist known as ‘The Editor’, most of the female characters are reduced to the roles of cyborg geishas, tiki waitresses and brainless beach babes. Particularly annoyingly, the game’s femme fatale (who, considering the nature of the role in spy fiction, is scandalously underused) is a giggling blonde moron, and while this joke might work as a joke if she were the only giggling blonde moron, by the time you actually encounter her, the joke has already been massively overplayed. Unfortunately, the game continues to play that same joke out some more. And more.
Still, there are a couple of extremely minor female characters of note; a Scottish girl working at a Tiki bar has some particularly funny lines, and the Escapist’s Jim Sterling manages a delectably over the top performance in a quick and bizarre Carmen-Miranda-Power-Rangers-Fruit-Ninja-Reference-Minigame that’s extremely easy to miss, but the game is still most certainly a very male-centric world and I can’t help but feel that there’s a lot of jokes they missed out on by not giving their female characters any actual characterization. The same could also be said for the game’s Asian characters who seem to be entirely defined by their stereotypes throughout the Blade-Runner styled back streets level.
Much like the writing, the minigames are somewhat hit-and-miss. While there are some interesting ideas in there, and a couple of particularly well made ones as optional hidden features, later on more and more of the main plotlines involve playing minigames with jokes or pop culture references that can be summed up in a single image or sentence. While hiding an entire deathmatch FPS about weddings in the game (Wedding Quake, geddit?), it’s not actually that fun to play, and as the game starts forcing you through poorly conceived minigame after poorly conceived minigame (a Wave Race 64 parody involving remote controlled gravy boats probably makes the least sense from a humor point of view) the fun and discovery is replaced by tedium.
The game also seems to be plagued with some minor, but very noticeable, bugs (although the game has been updated at least twice over the last couple of days, some of these issues may already have been fixed by release). At one point, a freak occurrence involving a falling pigeon somehow caused the game to catapult me to the roof of the Soviet consulate. Another rather more worrying bug had me stuck in the black, empty transition screen that appears between walking through a door and arriving on the other side, a problem which I finally managed to fix by saving the game at that point and immediately reloading it. Other issues include minor graphical glitches, lines of audio cut out before they have ended, and objects that occasionally activate immediately upon collection when they are supposed to be examinable beforehand.
Still, Jazzpunk is an interesting, if flawed title, and even with all of the dud jokes and the propensity towards the LOL RANDOM side of the humor spectrum, there are plenty of jokes and moments that stick. It never manages to approach the incredibly layered humour of the Zucker and Zucker movies that it so incredibly wants to be, and presentation-wise, Brendan Chung’s Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving still get the better of it, but Jazzpunk is a game with a lot of heart and an incredible number of Easter eggs and hidden features to discover that may well be what you’re looking for, especially if you want to try something very, very different.
Areas for Development
- More cliché-subverting female characters
- Tweaks to make the minigames more fun
- Replace unpassable knee-high walls with something more convincing
Final Analysis
Technical Competency – 7/10
Graphical State/Sound Quality – 7/10
Network Stability – N/A
Overall – 7.0
There’s a lot to like about Jazzpunk, but it could have done with some more work, both in the programming and writing departments. Still, it makes for a unique and enjoyable way to waste a couple of hours, and I’m sure the Lets’ Play communities will love it for its completely bizarre aesthetics, unpredictability and myriad of hidden features.
(These grades assess our playthrough, taking into consideration how many (if any) bugs were encountered, whether there were any interruptions in gameplay and the product’s final technical state. These scores, coupled with the Final Analysis and Areas for Development, are suggestions for future patches and updates which the developers could (and in our opinion, should) explore. These scores are separate to our DLC/Expansion Reviews but link into our Patch/Firmware Reviews.)
(These scores are not designed as a grading system to determine the entertainment value of a product and should not be treated as such..)
Issues you’ve encountered
- If a gamepad is plugged into the computer, then the mouse sensitivity level is altered to match that of the gamepad sensitivity. Altering mouse and keyboard controls requires that any gamepads be unplugged.
- Being hit by a falling pigeon randomly catapulted a player to the top of a building (although they are unable to replicate this freak occurrence)
- Entering a door once froze someone into a black abyss from which there was no escape (except saving the game and loading it up again)
- One object was visible through walls, although they are not sure what it was, or why.
- While an abridged version of what characters are saying appears over them throughout the game, these are insufficient for the hearing-impaired as they often miss jokes and aren’t visible unless you’re looking directly at the character.
Have you encountered any bugs and problems in your playthrough? Anything we missed? Add them in the comments below and we’ll slot them in!
You must be logged in to post a comment.