Meet Dylan the dog.  He’s an overenthusiastic mutt who wants to win all the Jump Master badges.  With his owl mentor by his side, he’ll challenge all sorts of crazy cartoon animal characters like a hippie giraffe, goth dolphin, gangster rat, and more!  Go Go Jump!!! is a single screen jumping challenge where all you have to do is run and jump to avoid obstacles.  The game also has a madcap, tongue in cheek sense of humor, too.  It’s available on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

Controls are super simple.  Move Dylan around with the control stick and press the button to jump.  And that’s it.  Story is the main mode where you pick an animal to challenge and go to town.  You’ll have a bit of humorous dialogue before you start the challenge.  All you have to do is jump over the obstacles they send your way.  But if you get hit once, you must start over from the last checkpoint.  You can tell you’ve passed a checkpoint because there will be a bit more dialogue.  Do this enough times to pass the level.  Some stages are more difficult than others.  Luckily you have unlimited tries.  Other modes include Boss Rush, where you challenge all the animals all in a row.  Challenge lets you take on, well, challenges like avoiding obstacles a certain number of times.  And Survival has you seeing how long you can last against a single opponent.

I really liked the humor and effort they put into such a simple game, as everyone has spoken voice and such.  Reminds me of story based rhythm games like PaRappa the Rapper and whatnot.  But the game is way too hard and requires pinpoint accuracy.  The level of rote memorization you must have to pass levels wasn’t very much fun to me after a while.  I wish they could’ve had  a difficulty selection where you could take more than one hit or something.  It’s a shame because the rest of the game has such high production values.

Kid Factor:

Go Go Jump!!! is rated E for Everyone with ESRB descriptors of Alcohol Reference, Mild Fantasy Violence, and Mild Language.  Normally I’m pretty lenient with the ESRB ratings, but not this time.  I’m surprised this one didn’t get a E-10 or a T rating.  While I didn’t notice any alcohol or bad language, you do get shot at by machine guns, tanks, ninja stars, cannons, and more.  And even though all you do when you get hit is just fall over with stars around you, the violence is a little more than mild to me.  And while I didn’t notice any bad language, they get as close as they can to saying bad words without actually doing so.  The humor is about on par with The Simpsons, so because of that and the high challenge level, I’d say this one’s best for older kids and above.

Tags: Game Reviews