Game review: Jetpack Joyride and Wizorb for PS Vita

This will be a review of two Sony Mini games, and also a study in stark contrasts. I loved one game and want to gush about it at length, and I loathed the other and only want to highlight why it felt like a waste of time and money.

Let me start by showing the love first for the PS Vita version of Jetpack Joyride, which began life as an iOS app. Reviews on the iPood version were glowing everywhere, and I’d longed for a version to try on my Win Phone. That never happened, but when I saw that there was a Vita version for $2.99, I jumped at the chance to finally find out if the hype had been justified. I’m happy to say it deserves all the praise it’s been given, and then some.

The game’s story is simple: you’re Barry, a spy in a tuxedo with the sleeves ripped off. You break into a factory of scientists, steal a jetpack, and proceed to wreak havoc while the possibly evil lab owners do their best to halt your rampage. At its heart, the goal of the game is just trying to best your previous run and get a little deeper into the factory. To help you along, you’ll find a variety of vehicles, and after you’ve collected some cash in the levels, you can unlock new jetpacks, gadgets, utilities, costumes, and vehicle upgrades.

First, let’s look at the jetpacks. Instead of just reskinning the same pack over and over, each pack has a slightly different feel in handling, with some being faster or slower to respond to inertia. The bubble pack will let you fall a lot farther before its output can overcome gravity, while the laser jetpack will shoot you to the top of the screen much faster than the other packs. There’s a gatling gun, a standard jetpack, a machine gun with a shark fin, and even a steampunk model. You DO want to try all of them and find out which model works best for you. For me, the standard jetpack is fantastic, so I only switch to my bubble and laser packs for a change of pace sometimes.

Then there’s the vehicles, a crazy assortment that you will find a personal favorite for and at least one that makes you cringe when you get it. For me, the best vehicle is Profit Bird, a flapping plane-like ship with a hinged beak that opens and gives you a bit more real estate to catch coins with. As you have to push the X button for each flap, this vehicle has the most direct feeling of being in control, and every vehicle after it feels like steps downward until I get to the Gravity Suit, which does exactly what the name implies and lets you swap gravity to run on the ceiling. I didn’t like it because it’s hard to sort out a button pressing rhythm to keep Barry floating in the middle of the screen, and instead the suit seems to be magnetically drawn to hazards.

In between these two vehicular choices are the Bad As Hog, a motorcycle and shotgun combo that lets you blast scientists with buckshot; Mr. Cuddles, a mechanical flying dragon who breaths fire; Lil’ Stomper, a robot mecha with rockets in its hands to make assisted long-distance jumps; and The Crazy teleporter, another device that does exactly what the label implies.

Upgrades for these vehicles make them “magnetic” so that you pick up coins easier, and then there’s gold versions, for the ultimate in snooty rampaging. I haven’t tried the gold versions, but I love the magnetized upgrades and will even endure the Gravity Suit so long as coins keep coming at me with ease.

The hazards in the games are an assortment of spy movie favorites. There’s electric zappers, floating laser traps, and homing missiles that will show up first as an exclamation points at the right side of the screen to let you know you’re being targeted. That exclamation point will flash with a yellow spiky bubble to let you know the missile has been launched, and you either fly over it or drop under it if you were airborne.

And while I’m talking up hazards, I must give kudos to the game makers for addressing one of my gaming pet peeves, which can be summed up, “If it’s deadly for me, it should be deadly for my enemy too.” Lot of games simply ignore a bullet passing from an enemy gun through an anemy body before it reaches me and kills me, and that shit pisses me off every single time I see it. Friendly fire isn’t fucking friendly, and I wish game makers would learn this and aply the same rules to enemies that they do to me. And here in Jetpack Joyride, if one of the little white hazard-suited scientists runs into a zapper, they get fried. If a homing missile hits them, they drop, and the floating lasers cook their butts just like mine if they run into the beam.

I thought at fist the zapper animations were buggy because sometimes scientists seemingly walked through the field of current. But then I noted that the floor had three layers of depth, and the non-panicked scientists were actually walling around the zapper. This is a nice touch, a suggestion of a 3D environment in a 2D game. I wish I could walk around the zappers in the same way, but I can at least see why some scientists got fried and others dodged that deathtrap.

There’s all kinds of nice touches in this game, from the gorgeous backgrounds and catchy theme song to the special items and the hilarious death animations for Barry and the scientists.

But this whole game would get dull fast if the only point was making more distance on each run, even with the levels being randomly generated with every play-through. What keeps the game fresh are the missions. These missions are little goals that may or may not have anything to do with your distance. Some ask you to high five the scientists, or to travel a certain distance without harming them. Some might ask you to buy an item and use it in the game. Some might ask you to have a “near miss” with the hazards. If a mission seems too hard to you, you can pay some gold from your stash to pass the mission without actually completing it. (I’ve not yet used this feature, but I appreciate that it’s there.)

When Barry gets killed by a hazard, he also has a chance to deploy a bomb which will propel him a few meters farther up the screen. There’s also head starts that jet you 750 or 1500 meters into the game without dealing with the hazards. (If your run end with you inside a hazard, the game will ignore it, another nice touch that pleases my beady black heart.) Then there are floating spin tokens you can collect to play a slot machine mini-game after Barry’s inevitable and routine demises. Prizes in this slot machine include a second life to keep going from where Barry dropped, a free head start to advance you 750 meters in the next round, bombs of varying blast strengths that will hurl your body a few more meters, extra spin tokens, and lots of gold. Lastly, there’s a gold doubler that will work in the next round to make every coin you collect worth two coins.

With all this gushing, you might think I have no complaints about Jetpack Joyride, but I do have a couple. First, the random level generations often result in situations that are impossible to pass. A tricky jump sequence is one thing, but the game has these rotating zappers that extend all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and it doesn’t matter if you drop or fly or run; you still fry. In fact, I hate the rotating zappers and feel like they’re cheap and annoying in an otherwise gloriously fun game.

My other problem is with the “Air Barry” shoes that grant you a regular jump ability. But the jump is haphazard, and a short press of the jump button results in wildly different jump heights even if I hit the button for the same length of time. Some jumps barely cleared the floor, which was what I wanted, but the next press at the same speed hurtles me up to the ceiling or into a zapper or laser, and that shit is infuriating when you only wanted to hop over a short hurdle. (It also doesn’t help that Barry’s “hit box” is iffy, and sometimes half his body goes through a hazard without harm while the very next hazard kisses a stand of hair and fries his ass.)

And the grammar Nazi in me longs to point out that several missions compel me to fly at maximum height and “rub your head on the roof.” No, I’m rubbing my head on the ceiling. To rub my head on the roof, I’d have to leave the building and fly upside down.

Despite these very minor nitpicks, I’m ready to give Jetpack Joyride and enthusiastic 5 stars. I’ve played through all the mission levels twice to earn badges and start over at the beginner-level missions, and last night I may have made a permanent toilet ring imprint in my butt because I kept saying, “Just one more try.” All this for a cheap mini-game that puts some of Sony’s AAA efforts on the Vita to shame. For a game with only one button and a goofy premise, this is so much fun that I cannot help but heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a fun time waster.

For as much as I loved Jetpack Joyride, I couldn’t say the same for Wizorb, a “tribute” to Breakout-type games built around the story of a wandering wizard hero. While the premise and trailer sounded great, I only played the game a few hours before losing my patience with it and wandering off.

Three flaws kill the fun of this game, and if the game makers could address these issues in a future patch, I might give this Mini another go. But the first flaw is, the paddle moves at the exact same speed as the ball. In every Breakout clone I’ve played, the paddle moves faster than the ball, allowing you to slide over and catch falling items before zipping the paddle back under the ball. But in Wizorb, most of the time you have to choose between sacrificing the ball to catch items or staying under the ball and losing all the loot. This sucks a donkey dick, and I hated playing mainly because of this handicap.

Flaw number two is, you must play every level in a world or you will lose whatever items you collected in previous levels. So there’s no playing one level and exiting to go back to town. No, you play all the levels or you get nothing. Fuck that noise.

And finally, there’s the antiquated continue credits bullshit. Game makers, arcades needed continue credits to convince little kids to keep plinking more quarters into those coin slots. Once I’ve paid you for the game, there’s no need for you to try and earn more quarters, so this continue credits thing is a dinosaur who didn’t get the memo that it was extinct in the last ice age.

Graphically, the game is cute in an 8-bit Zelda kind of way, and the chip tune music is passable and not too grating. But because of these three deal breakers sucking the joy out of the game early on, I give Wizorb 1 star and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, not even fans of Breakout or its clones. There are better version of the game to play that aren’t half as irritating as this slow and painful turd.