Welcome back Time Wasters!
Remember how I said in last week’s article that I was going to be looking into Chapter Two of The Last Door this week? Well, unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to sit down and play it. So rather than give you a rushed version of something I want to devote as much time as I can to, I found a different game and will try to get to Chapter Two next week (you’re all just heartbroken, I know). But enough of my excuses; let’s get started.
This week’s Time Waster is called RGB+jump, and if you guessed that this game is about colors and jumping, you’d be right. The game focuses on a jumper (you of course) and challenges you with getting as far as you can by jumping across platforms in the hopes that you don’t mess up and fall into oblivion. All the while you’re going to be trying to earn as many points as possible before your tumble into obscurity; the more points you earn the better.
Sounds easy enough. So how do you earn points? Points are given in this game by continually running and earning multipliers, and you get multipliers by jumping on the same color platforms. That’s where the RGB of the game comes in. There are three different colored platforms: red, green and blue, and by jumping on only one color your score is doubled, then tripled and so on. Jumping on a different color will start your multiplier over at one, but since all you’re doing is jumping platforms, it won’t be that hard to build it back up. Well, that’s true in theory anyway.
There are a couple of things that I thought were really nifty ideas about RGB+jump; the main one being that you were in first person view during your run, which is what drew me to this game in the first place. This game is no Mirror’s Edge, but it only requires you to jump through a straightforward course, so it didn’t need to be anything too drastic and it didn’t take long to get the hang of. The multipliers based on combining the same colored platforms was another thing I liked, as switching your position midair was a must and required timing. The game was also 3D instead of 2D, which was a nice change of pace from the flash games I’ve been playing (other than some phone ones of course, but let’s face it, 3D phone games aren’t really uncommon).
The only real problem I had was with the game’s controls, and unfortunately it really broke the game for me. The first issue was that your jump was one static jump; holding the space bar longer didn’t make you jump farther and barely touching it didn’t make you do a hop. Since you have just one jump, some platforms were impossible to land on because you overshot them since you landed a little too far up on your last jump (in normal mode at least, as all of the platforms in easy mode are the same size, but who wants to play easy mode?).
The other problem was that you can’t immediately jump again when you land. On several occasions I managed to land on the end of a platform but then just ran off the edge to my death because my jump wouldn’t activate again. Due to this, focusing on getting a multiplier bonus will more likely than not just add up to a quick death, and the only thing you want to do instead is focus on the platforms you know you can land on, jumping to them regardless of color. Unfortunately this way of play makes the whole RGB part of this game almost unnecessary since survival is more important than short lived color bonuses.
To really have as much fun with this game as I could, I would love to see the jumping mechanic tweaked a bit so that players can have more control over their jumper. But as the game is now, it doesn’t blow me away.
RGB+jump only earns 2 GiN Gems out of 5.