Jumponaut is a very poorly made 2D retro pixel hybrid of a Tetris block placement game and a 2D retro pixel platformer. Square blocks drop at regular intervals... directly over your head! Jump around over the existing blocks and try to get the new block to drop into a space that fills a gap and hopefully fills a row. Like Tetris, but crappy and annoying.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The controls and game handling are notably very floaty and imprecise. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing or polish done.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Jumponaut didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for achieving an "x3 streak", not all that hard to do if you try to play the game, and only around 23 percent of the very few players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. That's right, only 2. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Jumponaut 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.
[b]Note:[/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not count towards your Game Collector counts, achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
