Jazzpunk makes a fantastic first impression that wears thin by the end.
As Jazzpunk's brash, stylistic opening blares and swoops across the screen, you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's a game by Brendan Chung, the designer of bold, fantastic games like Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and the upcoming Quadrilateral Cowboy. Its got the same audacity and a similar visual style, full of loud colors and clean lines. It has the same panache for catchy brass music and it even splashes giant white text into the world in the same way. But a Brendan Chung game it ain't.
Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving were both full of very dark humor juxtaposed with a bright and cheerful art style, but I wouldn't call either of them "silly." The stories they told were about as dark as they get, told in the language of neo-noir arthouse. But Jazzpunk is silly, like "slide down a slippery hallway into trash bags" silly. If that's not your bag, you probably won't get much out of it. If it is, then you'll probably like it a whole lot.
I came into this review intending to write some very positive things about Jazzpunk, and I'm trying to remind myself of the legitimately great parts. The game opens so strongly and I loved the opening couple levels a whole lot, but honestly, by the end, I was pretty tired of the whole experience. It's a pretty short game, taking me only about three hours, but again, this is not a Brendan Chung game. Even though Gravity Bone takes less than 15 minutes and Thirty Flights takes less than 10, I'd argue that both are far superior experiences than Jazzpunk.
The problem with Jazzpunk is that the myriad little hyuck-hyuck gags scattered about were more important to designer Luis Hernandez than the main objectives, and after those opening couple of levels, they're just not worth it. Everyone has a dozen things to say that you can click through and there are elaborate minigames to play, most of which outstay their initial joke. Some of the jokes even get reused between levels. The game just never knows when to quit and funnel you back toward the main path, which, looking back on it now, is actually pretty strong in itself. Well, at least until the self-indulgent, laborious final chapter that ends in such a baffling, abrupt way that I played through the entire chapter again just to make sure I hadn't missed some other way. It's an ending that probably sounded a lot funnier in concept than it is in execution. But regardless, the game gets distracted with itself to its own detriment. Getting distracted is kind of the point, sure, but a little more focus would have done a lot of good.
There's not much else I can say about Jazzpunk without directly analyzing the specifics of each level, but I'm not going to do that because a game like this lives and dies on players seeing that stuff for themselves, and there's definitely some pretty incredible stuff in here you should see for yourself. I wouldn't recommend playing through the game in one sitting like I did. Space it out and play it when you're in a good mood and Jazzpunk can be a fun and ridiculous time. If you find yourself getting tired of the jokes or beelining it for the end of a level, just save and quit and come back later.
So I don't know. I really loved the first half an hour or so of the game, but it really started to wear on me after that and I don't think taking a break would've solved all of Jazzpunk's problems for me. It's a cool game and I'm glad I played it, but I can't help wishing it had cut some of the lamer jokes to deliver a tigther, funnier experience.
