Cube Jump is Ketchapp’s latest title. As an endless arcade game, Cube Jump has players bouncing a cube through the vastness of space, hoping from moving platform to moving platform, attempting to see how far they can travel. It’s all …
Cube Jump is Ketchapp’s latest title. As an endless arcade game, Cube Jump has players bouncing a cube through the vastness of space, hoping from moving platform to moving platform, attempting to see how far they can travel. It’s all a super simple concept, and just as easy to play as it was to explain how to play it.
How much you’ll actually enjoy Cube Jump all comes down to to pretty much how much you enjoy Crossy Road. Mechanically speaking, Cube Jump and Crossy Road are essentially the same game. Instead of jumping into the empty spaces, like you do in Crossy Road, you jump to the occupied spaces in Cube Jump, —imagine the platforms in Cube Jump are the roofs of vehicles, to help you visualize what I mean.
It’s inverted Crossy Road, basically.
Now, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if Cube Jump added to the formula in its own way. But apart from having a minimalistic, outer-space theme, and a different scoring system, Cube Jump is basically a cut-and-paste, watered-down Crossy Road.
That’s really all there is to it.
The scoring system doesn’t count how far you go, but instead it counts the kinds of tiles you’re jumping to and how fast you are jumping around. There are three tile types: landing on a big tile awards you with 1 point, landing on a medium-sized tile awards you with 2 points, and landing on the smaller tiles awards you with 3 points. Jumping from tile to tile at a rapid pace will trigger a score multiplier that will increase your score until your momentum slows.
There are cubes scattered across the tiles that you can pick up as you play. Collect enough and you can unlock new player models. The player models (speaking from the few I’ve managed to unlock) are all cosmetic and do not change the appearance of the game beyond the small, blocky avatar. Unlocking extra characters is a slow process, as the occasional reward for playing the game can be as pitiful as five cubes.
Also, the game features pop-up ads, and a constant banner ad at the bottom that at its worst is a distraction, and at its best is an eye-sore. In-app purchases can nullify these ads, but they exist from the start, nonetheless.
Cube Jump is just a wave rider. The game is piggy-backing on the success of another game, perhaps even picking up a few fans along the way. Personally, I recognize that Cube Jump is a functional game to play …but there are bigger and better options for mobile gamers looking for something in this vein.
