Aghhhh... as much as I want to, I can't get this game
it frustrated me (I guess it's supposed to) so the following post is probably more harsh than it should be.. so take it with a grain of salt
It has lots the aspects of platformers that I don't like.
- Press a button to respawn (I forget and get frustrated waiting)
- Gravity-switching (I can't get my head around it)
- Extremely floaty controls combined with tiny platforms (self explanitory)
The 'fly' button is incredibly frustrating for me... about 80% of my deaths are releasing the button before it's fully charged. I don't like waiting in games where I die a lot, so I don't usually want to wait the second for the fly to charge up - I press the button, press the direction I want to go, then I release the button to go.. but that just makes me fall. It seems uneccessary to make the player wait. My Xbox360 controller made it slightly more frustrating because the analogue stick is in a funny position and I end up putting it diagonally up+right when I want it to be straight up.. but that's a stupid Microsoft ergonomic design issue
The menu should be more fully controllable by the controller.. I was glad to see the main menu having controller support, but then the profile creation didn't. It really broke the nice flow by telling me I can't just press the button on the controller, I have to use the keyboard... and the name selection as well, had to type the name in when a 'left/right = select letter, up/down = change letter, button 1 = select' system could have worked just as easily.
I guess my main gripe was that I couldn't get the hang of the controls. That's probably my fault though,I'm not good with controls.
Oh, and one thing I noticed is that the artwork is sort of all-over-the-place.. some parts have fancy effects, the background is mega-pixelly, the sprites are another style again. it's odd. (okay now I'm just being cruel
)
EDIT: Oh, one more thing, the characters just aren't very memorable. The cool part of Jumper was... Ogmo! Ogmo is awesome. These little things aren't. I don't care if they live or die. Ogmo, on the other hand, seemed to look so sad to me when he fell down the screen...