The Switch is quickly turning into an Indie Game powerhouse, every week seems to bring us a treasure trove of gaming goodness. The unfortunate side effect of this endless bounty is that sometimes hidden gems are buried. It’s because of this that I try to take a peek each week to see if there is anything interesting that I hadn’t already heard about. When I noticed that a hard-as-nails platformer was coming out with the selling point of “You only need one button to play”, I was intrigued and had to check it out. Super One More Jump by Premo Games and SMG Studios definitely lives up to its hard platforming reputation, but is lovingly wrapped in a gorgeous pixel-art coat to soften the blow.
Super One More Jump tasks you with platforming your way through 100 increasingly more difficult levels. Your character auto-runs in the levels and your only control over it is the ability to hit any button on your controller to jump. While this one-button control scheme sounds simple enough, the game quickly layers on new obstacles, jumps, traps and hazards to keep things interesting. It also has an interesting gravity mechanism where you’ll auto rotate to the bottom of a platform if you jump off the end. This makes for some very nonlinear level design as you progress up walls, over pits and onto the underside of where you started.
When I got about half way through the game the difficulty really started to ramp up. Gone was the cake walk of the first few levels that I played, replaced with levels that caused me to die more than 100 times in an effort to perfect my jumps. While this may sound frustrating it really wasn’t. The game’s super quick respawn allowed me to instantly start back up after a death. This, combined with each death leaving ghostly evidence of my past mistakes, allowed me to quickly memorize the hazards and perfect my run.
Each of the game’s 100 levels also has three gems to collect. Most of these will be in out of the way areas forcing you to take a chance on an extra jump or two. Mercifully, all of the collected gems are saved when you complete a level. This way you can just replay levels to collect any remaining gems, removing the need to collect all three in one run. This was a nice way to add collectibles in the game without making the levels impossible to complete.
I love retro pixel art and Premo Games was speaking directly to my heart by commissioning nine pixel artists to add “skins” to the game. You can choose the level’s base look at anytime from the settings screen, and can use the gems you’ve collected to unlock additional avatars in the style of that skin to really make the game your own. What I found myself doing for most of my playtime was to set both the look and avatar selection to random. This kept the game fresh despite the multiple deaths and allowed me to see more of the themes than I normally would have.
Once you’ve finished completing the game’s base 100 levels there are a few additional game modes to keep you busy. You can play through some bite-sized levels in the vault mode, play through a constantly morphing Circuit mode, or chill out with the Endless mode. The latter is my favourite — you are scored on how far you make it through the procedurally generated level trying to get the high score. There are also two player endless and two to four player co-op modes if you would like to bring your friends along for the ride.
My only major complaint with this game is the lack of variety in the music. When you are spending 10 minutes trying to beat a level after dying a huge number of times, having the same one or two tracks repeat endlessly was a little more annoying than I thought it would be. In the end I just turned the game volume down and played my own tunes. I would have loved to have seen a large number of chiptune artists added to go with the huge selection of pixel artists who provided skins for the game. While this isn’t the end of the world for me, it is one glaring issue with an otherwise wonderful title.
If you are looking for some quick pick up and play platforming on your Switch, it’s hard to do much better than Super One More Jump. When you add in the fact that this game will only run you $7, it seems like this could be a perfect title to have loaded on your Switch for when you have a few minutes to kill. Even after completing the one hundred base levels, the addictive endless mode will mean that I’ll be playing this game for quite some time to come.
Pros:
- One button control, deep gameplay
- Pixel art fan’s dream
- Endless mode for lasting gameplay
Cons:
- More music variety is sorely needed
[yasr_overall_rating] 4/5
I played a digital copy of Super One More Jump that was provided by SMG Studio. If you have any questions on our review scale please see our About page.
