Happy Jump (iOS)

Doodle Jump helped to popularize the Endless Jumper genre on mobile platforms, its gameplay style simple, addictive, and easy to return to after a long time away. Like most any popular mobile game though, imitators and iterators leaped onto this popular genre to try and get their slice of the pie, and that is no doubt how a game like Happy Jump was born.

Happy Jump sticks to the basics of the endless jumper. As soon as you start a play session, your little red jelly character will begin bounding up and down on their own, and by tilting your device left or right, you can guide the jumps to land on platforms to help it get higher. Any time the jelly hits a platform they’ll jump again, and to keep them alive you need to make sure they always land somewhere safe. The screen wraps around to make jumping a bit easier, with your jelly able to jump off either edge of the screen and appear back in play on the opposite side. The platforms in Happy Jump are fairly simple grass covered rectangles, although some will move back and forth and others will crumble after you take your first jump off of them. If you fall too far off the bottom of the screen, any ground that was there before has disappeared and you will lose your current session. One of the goals of the game seems to be trying to get as high as possible before your demise, although the only obstacle besides platform placement are some flies that will buzz back and forth and can kill you instantly on contact. While you’re jumping, you can also collect coins that will be spent in the in-game shop for visual upgrades to your jelly or to give you boosts at the start of the round, with the coins even giving you a small boost upward as they’re collected. The game will even have areas where you can only ascend by bouncing off of floating coins, with the special large coins giving extra cash and a bigger boost. The biggest boosts though come from apples, where they launch you high up and make you invulnerable as well, letting you kill the flies and gain some height. There are even golden apples that are more effective but much rarer to help you get even higher.

For a casual player, Happy Jump does exactly what you would expect of an endless jumper. So long as you can keep jumping, you can keep playing, and there is no doubt that many people who just downloaded this game and played it for a few minutes were satisfied. If you wish to make this your endless jumper of choice though, the walls start tumbling down, and Happy Jump reveals just how dull it truly is.

The first thing it somehow fails at is the primary goal of the game. Endless jumpers are usually about trying to jump as high as you can before you mess up and lose, with the appeal of doing better next time driving you to play again and again. The main problem with how Happy Jump taps into this is how it represents how high you’ve jumped, that being it conveys it obtusely when it bothers to convey it at all. The moment your jelly takes its first jump, you’re already given an inordinate amount of points to match that small bit of height it achieved. The score display at the top is no doubt meant to be the metric with which you gauge how high you’ve reached, but as you get higher and higher, the number grows to such a large number in such strange intervals that it’s hard to gauge how well you’re doing at all. Of course bigger numbers mean you’re doing better, but it gets into the thousands too quickly and the other digits in the number seem to increase almost arbitrarily as you go. They do not seem to match any discernible measurement like units of height or number of platforms passed, so as you’re jumping it hardly feels like you’re making progress unless the starting digit manages to move as its the only one you can really track meaningfully. To its credit, Happy Jump does put down a few markers to make it clear you are making some progress, such as indicating where your highest point ever was, how high up you got last time was, and a spot that is the average of all previous jumps. If you don’t see these markers on screen though, it’s fairly hard to figure out if you’re making good progress, partially because the background and visuals never change. After you hop off the first piece of ground, you’re leaping up grassy platforms with a cloudy backdrop, and that will not change. There is no sense of progression if the background infinitely repeats, and since that number at the top just ticks up wildly as you go, it’s not really all that satisfying to get high up since it feels just the same as if you dropped out earlier. The most visual variety you can hope for is sometimes the floating coins will be arranged in hearts, stars, or other simple shapes.

So, let’s say you aren’t playing Happy Jump for the height though. Happy Jump definitely seems to think what it is bringing to the table as a new endless jumper is its adorable jelly protagonist, and the entire in-game store is devoted to changing their appearance or making them look cuter as they jump. You can turn them into different food types, give them a hat, give them a little trail that activates when they hit an apple… the options are actually pretty good, but the prices are not. In a particularly good run of Happy Jump where your goal is to collect the coins along the way, you can maybe guarantee around 100 to 200 coins. The game will space out the coins quite a bit to have areas of drought so you can’t get too many, and there are often areas where a fly is positioned almost perfectly where the automatic jumping of your character almost guarantees the loss unless you got lucky on an approach you can’t anticipate. This hampers the goal of gaining height as well of course, but it makes coin collecting even harder. The game does toss you a few low-priced items to whet your appetite, and they aren’t even bad ones, but once you’ve got the easy ones, the prices start getting into the thousands, with every trail costing 4,000 coins and many jelly costumes costing more than that. Unless you want to do your best at collecting coins across 20 to 40 rounds of bland jumping action, the trails feel like an insult… or a way of drawing money out of your wallet. Of course you can buy the coins with real money to make your character cuter instantly, and there are ways to earn free coins like watching ads or liking Happy Jump on Facebook. The ads are unusually generous in giving 1000 coins each, sort of undermining the process of coin collecting at all. It seems fairly clear that Happy Jump is either hoping for you to watch tons of ads to buy its costumes or hoping a little kid will want to be one of the adorable cartoon food characters but won’t be able to earn the coins for it in any reasonable time, likely begging their parents to spend some cash on this shallow phone game just because it’s cute.

There is something that could have almost redeemed the coin collecting system by way of boosts you can buy at the start of a jump. However, most every boost is not worth the investment, their prices not often converting into better performance and earnings. The most tempting one for coin collectors would be the x2 and x3 boosts, which will make random coins red or blue and worth more if picked up once you reach a certain height. However, these coins aren’t abundant enough for it to be easy to turn a profit, meaning they aren’t the way to go if you wish to survive. You can buy some protection from flies to try and get further, the options being to survive one or two hits depending on how much you spend, and again the profit is low as you have to throw down basically a run’s worth of coins and the game has many spots designed to deny you coins but pit you against many flies. There is a boost that slows down fly movement, making it easier to sneak past them with your jumps, but the slowdown effects the first 10 or 20 you encounter, meaning that it’s likely to be wasted on flies that weren’t much trouble in the first place. The last boost is one that at least has a clear benefit if you’re just a player trying to get as high as you can, that being a bubble that will lift you up to an area higher up so you don’t have to dodge flies and jump up there yourself. You can have three boosts per session, but having even one likely means you’ll have lost coins getting there, and getting high scores is such a thankless task it doesn’t feel satisfying to get there. Ultimately, basically none of the additions really help Happy Jump shake off the dullness of its basic game design, but they at least don’t hurt the play too much.

THE VERDICT: Happy Jump is a game that relies on the casual fling. Its adorable jumping jelly makes it a cute endless jumper to play for a few minutes, but if you put any actual time into it to try and buy unlockables or beat your previous height score, its revealed to be a dull, Sisyphean task . The infinitely repeating background and odd increments for the score counter make it difficult to track your progress, it takes far too many sessions to afford the visual upgrades that seem to be the game’s main appeal, and the boosts to help you get further and grab more coins are actually too much of a drain to be worth the expense. Happy Jump doesn’t want you to stick around long enough to see the cracks in its incredibly basic design unless you’re the kind of person who would throw real money at it to turn your red jelly into a orange jelly.

And so, I give Happy Jump for iOS…

A BAD rating. If you’ve only dipped your toe in Happy Jump, this rating might seem harsh, but that style of play is what Happy Jump is counting on. If you only play this game for a few minutes, it likely would seem inoffensive and cute, but any game can find a cross-section of gameplay that makes it look decent. If you do devote a lengthy sitting to Happy Jump though, you’ll see it doesn’t have much going for it. It’s cute main character is the only real point of visual interest in the game and they try to keep you from changing it with unusually high prices. The journey to get the expensive goodies is tedious and the jumping feels like a grind already due to an absence of variation, but the gameplay isn’t really bad so much as it is uninspired. There are better endless jumpers for free and likely just as cute so long as you don’t need an 8,000 coin reindeer jelly to enjoy your quest to jump as high as possible, so Happy Jump doesn’t have much to offer.

While your little jumping jelly may be smiling, Happy Jump won’t make you happy unless you experience it through a brief inoffensive brush. Otherwise, it’s just an endless jumper that doesn’t have anything going for it, putting it just below the bar of quality needed to at least be a mindless pastime.