"Jump/Die/Live" is a very mediocre 2D retro/minimalist platformer where the phoned-in graphics meet an equally phoned-in concept. The floor is lava, it's rising, you have to jump around to get to the exit point and obviously don't fall in the lava. What a time to be alive, this is surely the pinnacle of game design. Truly state of the art.
The gameplay handling isn't the worst here but it's also not the best... Super Meat Boy had a million handicaps from terrible graphics onwards, but it overcame just because of the tight controls. Not so here.
This features really godawful pixelcrap/minimalist "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them.
It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 2 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it?
Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.
