Jumping Jax

I played this game on stream with the developers for a few hours, and it's definitely got something interesting aspects to it. It's early access, so I expect a decent amount of polish down the line in terms of visuals and juice, but it's got the movement mechanics down to a tee so far. This game behaves almost identically to bhopping in the source engine, so anyone familiar with the mechanics from those games would have a very easy time getting into Jumping Jax. It also adds some more interaction in terms of the portal mechanics, which work very similarly to the portal mechanics in Portal, albeit a little on the buggy side (again, it's in Early Access, so I'll let that slide). Together, these make for some interesting level concepts that you won't find in any other game. That being said, many of the levels currently in the game require a very good understanding of bhopping mechanics, and unfortunately the tutorials that were present at the time I played were on the less useful side. They explained the controls and objectives well enough, but the mechanics themselves are so intricate that it would take many many hours of practice before you got to the point of being able to beat some of the other levels. This isn't necessarily an issue for people that enjoy this sort of high skill ceiling trial and error, but it could turn away more casual players. Though, interestingly, many of the levels present can be completed without full mastery of the mechanics (albeit not fast enough to top out the leaderboards), and that adds a certain drive to keep playing and continue learning the mechanics in order to beat out your previous times. The game is currently free, so there's no reason not to download it and give it a shot. Going forward, I think it will be very successful among the niche crowd it's designed to target, but could become more popular among the more casual crowd with the addition of some (optional) helper mechanics and some lower difficulty levels to ease the learning curve.