Color Jumper is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This console (switch) ported platformer has one single, uninteresting gimmick where you play a square with 4 different coloured edges. The square rotates 90 degrees each time you jump. Each edge interacts with matching colours and white surfaces, and passes through coloured surfaces it doesn't match with, creating various tiresome puzzle platformer scenarios as you need to balance reflexes and correct rotation choices.
That's all there is to this very shallow platformer experience.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Color Jumper has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for collecting a collectible, trivial to achieve, but less than 10 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 10 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Color Jumper is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
There's a few revelations and some outright dishonesty from the developer here. First up, the dishonesty, where the developer tries to mislead gamers.
The developer chooses to attack the review by failing to acknowledge the real reason they used crap pixel "art" instead of doing their job properly and arranging contemporary visuals. We all know if they were capable of doing better, they would. If they were capable, competent, and approached this with the right skillset and budget, it would resemble games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadows Die Twice. But they didn't... an inadequacy that should not be a problem for gamers to have to put up with. It's an insult to gamers that the developer pretends they can do better instead of admitting the truth (and the developer has another game that looks just as crap as this one). "I made it look bad on purpose, I could have made it look like Cyberpunk 2077 but I chose not to!!!!". Yeah right. Gamers smell BS easily.
The developer both acknowledges that this is a handheld game (confirming that fact of my review without doubt), but seems upset about me pointing that out to gamers. See, it doesn't matter what order the developer launched this console game on which platform, the fact is that it's a console game, has all the qualities of a console game, was designed for the lowest common denominator of gaming platforms, and thus compares poorly to games designed for PC. This is useful for gamers to know, which is why I include this important information in my reviews. But we must ask why the developer is so upset about being confronted with facts they themselves confirm. Guilty conscience perhaps?
The developer, at the same time, insults PC gamers, showing his true colors. That tells us everything we need to know, really.
The developer admits they "learned a lot" trying to make this game. That's an admission they weren't qualified to make professional quality games! Why is this something gamers should put up with? If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The developer supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
