Metascore

Universal acclaim - based on 27 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 55 Ratings

  • Summary: You're going for a ride - from the creators of FRUIT NINJA! Suit up with a selection of the coolest jetpacks ever made and take to the skies as Barry Steakfries, the lovable hero on a one-way trip to adventure. Simple one-touch controls and immediately accessible gameplay support a huge amount of content including missions, level ups, achievements, jetpack upgrades, unlockables, coins and more. This is the most anticipated game yet from Australian developer Halfbrick. Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 26 out of 27
  2. Negative: 0 out of 27
  1. 100
    An exhaustingly fun game.
  2. Sep 7, 2011
    100
    Jetpack Joyride goes beyond addicting, it needs another word to describe it (Addictacular? Addictastic?).
  3. Jan 10, 2012
    80
    It all comes down to the fact that I would rather pay for a carefully tuned game than get a financially optimized one for free. But I guess if a developer's going to screw up the equation, they might as well do it with a game as good as Jetpack Joyride.
  4. Sep 16, 2011
    70
    Quotation forthcoming.

See all 27 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 19 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 20
  3. Negative: 1 out of 20
  1. Addictive, fun, & easy to play, Jetpack Joyride has got to be one of the best iOS apps of the year. It has rich graphics, a cool sound and a nice RPG element that blends in nicely with the game. Overall, the game is a great expirence for gamers and iPhone users. Expand
  2. One of my favorites game with Crazy Escape and Pix'n Love Rush. A lots of action, rythm and upgrade. Simple to play, one touch button and with innovative gameplay. The replay value is impressive. Expand
  3. A fun and addictive game where you fly high on a jetpack and avoid obstacles in your path. You can purchase items with coins that you collect in the game, or you can purchase them using real money. My score: 82/100 Expand
  4. I got this game because I saw that the rating was quite astronomical on Metacritic. I also got it because I liked fruit ninja. In Jetpack Joyride you are basically going as far as you can through one extremely long level (ala Tiny Wings). Like Tiny Wings, there is not really a goal to the game beyond going as far as you can. This concept works extremely well in Tiny Wings, because Tiny Wings central mechanism is a developable skill. You can feel yourself improve over time, and therefore a "goal-less" system still feels rewarding.

    In JJ however, this is not the case. After many many plays you don't feel as though you've really gotten any better at the game. This is because your deaths are basically random, and not a true measure of your skill at the game. You will be flying along when randomly an "electro-wirery-killing-thing" (the main obstacle in the game), will appear on the side of the screen you are on. A lot of the time you are in a position where there it is not even actually POSSIBLE to get out of the way, regardless of your response time / skill level. This makes your death feel inevitable, and random.

    When you are done a level, you get to play a slot machine for various bonuses using tokens that appear randomly during the level. I find this rather ironic, as it is quite metaphorical of the actual game play itself. This whole app is just a big slot machine.

    What's worse, is that the upgrades are mostly completely USELESS, literally. Only about 5 of them actually do anything (the vehicle magnets), and they only improve your ability to score coins, and do not effect your ability to perform in any way. This is actually reminiscent of Tiny Wings' system, as TW just upgrades your points multipliers instead of upgrades. This upgrading philosophy keeps the game a "pure skill" game, meaning that the high scores are in no way effected by upgrades. The fundamental difference is that TW's skill ceiling is much much much higher than JJ's . Since the game is NOT a pure skill game, the developers should have included **** of awesome upgrades that allow you to get better and better and go farther and farther. What a wasted opportunity. To be clear, I have nothing against random games Peggle is one of my favorite casual games of all time. But Peggle doesn't pretend to be a skill based game. JJ does.

    There are also consumables, that are astronomically expensive... one of which could be initially conceived as useful, which is the "second chance" consumable which allows you to . However going as far as you can in the game doesn't actually feel like the goal of the game. The goal of the game feels like scoring as many coins as possible. So, if the goal is scoring as many coins as possible, why would I spend 5000 coins on something that will allow me to continue through one of my random deaths? It's completely, and utterly stupid. One of the other upgrades is a "750m head start", but again this goes under the assumption that I feel like the goal of the game is to go as far as I can, which isn't the case.

    The only place this game hits, and hits hard, is the aesthetics. It's Metal Slug-esc veneer is gorgeous, the coins and sounds are so cute you just wanna eat them. The skin of this game masks an other wise completely pointless, goalless, random, skill-less system, pretending to be the opposite.

    I'm actually dumbfounded by the positive reviews this game has received. It's clear that the critics of the game app market don't have much gaming experience. For a skill based "go as far as you can" game, play Tiny Wings. For a random "go as far as you can" game, play Flight by Armor games. This game fails on all fronts, but sure does look pretty.
    Expand

See all 20 User Reviews

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