Jumper: Griffin's Story – Reviewed

I posted an article a few weeks back listing the top 10 worst Xbox 360 games, well imagine my suprise when the next batch of review games came in and contained two out of the top ten…

Personally I am a sucker for punishment so I wasn’t that bothered and was actually a bit excited about the whole idea. We decided that Philip can take Blacksite, which ended up getting 68%, and I will take Jumper…

So last weekend I sat down early on Saturday and started Jumper. Which is apparently a movie tie in to some movie I haven’t watched.

It started out quite well actually and I thought this was going to be yet another story of a game being picked on for not being great.

The basic story is that Griffin’s family were killed by Palladins and he can jump in and out of existence. He is now trying to find the one that killed his family to get his revenge. So nothing out of the ordinary there a good solid, all be it heavily overdone, story.

Then the actual game play started and I was quite impressed. The attacking system of this game is like nothing I have ever seen before. You target an enemy using the trigger, which then puts a halo of 4 quadrants around the enemy, and then push one of the four buttons to attack. Y to attack from behind, A for in front, B for the side and R for the other side.

If one of the quadrants are red and you attack from that side the enemy will defend themselves. If it is green then it builds up your jumper bar (or whatever it’s called) else you just score a hit.

When the jumper bar becomes full you perform an awesome finish of some sort. Some of the ones I saw where grabbing your opponent, jumping them above the Grand Canyon and then jumping out again leaving them to fall to their death. Another one was where you left a guy stranded on top of some huge mountain or you pop him into a car that is about to be crushed.

So all in all I was actually enjoying this, after about 10 minutes though you realise that this is it. This is the entire be all and end all of this game. Have you any idea how boring something gets when all you have to do is watch the colours around the circle and hit the corresponding button?

Well after about 20 minutes I was dying inside and after 30 minutes I just couldn’t take it anymore. So yes there is a possibility that this game gets better after 30 minutes, I highly doubt it though.

There is a plus to this game though, I got around 600 achievement points in those 30 minutes and after taking a quick look through the remaining ones I would say that it will be very easy to get 950/1000 for this game. The other 50 is for finishing the game without dying which would have required me to start again… that isn’t going to happen.

I normally like to give games extra credit for trying something new but this one really sucks, if you are a GSW then it is worth it else skip it entirely.

I would like to thank Nu-Metro distribution for the other nice games that we have to review, this one I could have lived without though.

Metacritic Score: 32 (Apparently the game can be done in 2 hours if you can handle it)

Last Updated: March 28, 2008