Jumanji: Wild Adventures Review

 I'm coming at this review with feelings of trepidation. A while back, I reviewed JUMANJI: The Curse Returns on the Switch, and it wasn't great; it was actually quite disappointing. Jumanji: Wild Adventures is based on the new movies, so instead of playing the Jumanji board game, a lightning storm traps our heroes inside the Jumanji videogame cartridge with the goal of finding The Jaguar’s Eye jewel that has been stolen. Before getting into the action, you will select the game’s difficulty. Easy: falling only takes half a heart away, and you have infinite lives. Medium: falling into a hole costs you a full heart if you lose three lives and you restart at the checkpoint. Jumanji: once again, falling will cost a full heart; the enemies hit harder, and losing three lives restarts you at the checkpoint.

This action-adventure game supports up to four players locally, allowing players to be one of the four main characters from the movies: Dr. Smolder Bravestone, Ruby Roundhouse, Mouse Finbar, and Prof. Shelly Oberon. Each hero is equipped with a different item that will be used in combat. Smolder has gloves for punching, Ruby wears special boots for her kicks, Mouse has a trusty backpack that he smashes enemies with, and since Shelly is a palaeontologist, he has the brush that he uses to clean fossils with. If you start playing on your own, another player can jump in or out at any point in time, which is super handy. I will warn you that if you are playing multiplayer, you can easily be left behind if your teammates are the type to rush and run ahead. While playing with my son, he would run off, forcing the screen to follow him, trapping me in a bubble that moved me over to his location. This got quite annoying, so I wasn’t too upset when he wanted to stop playing, leaving me on my own!

The game starts you off in the jungle, giving you a Jeep to drive to each of the stage locations. Driving around was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. You aren’t only driving in a straight line to the next spot, but you could take more scenic routes and challenge stages in any order you like. You don’t have this much freedom while playing the levels; it is an on-rails experience, and if you try to venture off on your own, you will find invisible walls or spots you just can’t access. The only time you are allowed to go on your own is when you are collecting the letters to spell JUMANJI. Normally, in games like this, you are able to move the camera using the right thumbstick. Jumanji: Wild Adventures has a fixed camera, leading to a lot of blind jumps where you just have to hope there will be ground below you. Thankfully there are multiple checkpoints in each stage that are marked with green torches. Once you successfully get to the end, your whole team earns XP to level up and get upgrades like a heart container, giving your team more hit points.

Since you are in the jungle, the main type of enemy that you will face is insects, and there are a lot of them. To dispel them, you can use attacks like punching and kicking or weapons like Mouse’s backpack. If you come across and break a floating glowing box, your character will get a weapon to use. Ruby gets a polearm that looks like a spear and allows her to reach higher platforms that she can’t normally get to. Smolder gets a boomerang to smash enemies with and collect items that are out of reach, and Mouse has firecrackers that he can throw at an enemy and stay at a safe distance from. Poor Shelly gets items like bug spray and a fire extinguisher, which require you to get up close to the enemy to use. At least you can put out burning fires if you need to. Once you run into human foes from the warring factions, you will find that they will patiently wait for you to finish attacking their friend before they change into attack. They are so considerate!  

The game's music is pretty good, with the tracks matching the theme of the level that you are playing. It’s not super memorable, but it gets the job done. I was impressed by how good the sound effects in the game were; when I was fighting one of the giant mosquitoes, it sounded just like it was in the room with me! Jumanji Wild Adventures does have voice work for the characters, but of course, not by the actors in the movies, but the voice actors that they did use did a good job. However, I can easily say that I’m pretty tired of hearing “Dang straight!” and the same couple of sayings that each character had while attacking.  

The character designs for the heroes are done quite well; they definitely resemble the actors in the movies. The levels look nice, especially when the stationary camera pans through them. I will warn you that there are a lot of spiders at the one temple level, so if you have arachnophobia, this is going to be a title you are going to want to skip. Or, instead, make someone else play this level for you. I’m definitely not a huge spider fan, but when I ran into them, there was one on a platform above me. The game must have had a bug because when the arachnid tried to jump down to get me, it got stuck, looking like it was skydiving. It never got down; it was doomed to look like it was free-falling forever.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only buggy area in Jumanji: Wild Adventures. On one level, something glitched, and I wasn’t able to pick up the gold tokens or the letter spelling JUMANJI; I was just walking right through them like they didn’t exist. I figured I would just try to get further in the level and see if it was just that screen. As soon as I walked away, my character disappeared; all you could see was the dust cloud when you stepped in the sand. I had to pause and go back to the last checkpoint to get it working again. 

Jumanji: Wild Adventures is definitely better than I was expecting, but it is not without its flaws. It’s entertaining, but it doesn’t do anything drastically different that you haven’t experienced in an action-adventure game before. The enemy's strength was a little unbalanced; why is fighting a soldier equipped with weapons like guns and knives easier than killing a damn bug? Or when I was playing as Professor Oberon and having to fight a tiger with a shield and paintbrush. It was one of the most ridiculous moments that I had experienced in the game. I’m not sure how I ended up being victorious in that battle; the one thing this game has taught me is that as long as you have a backpack, you can easily win in a battle against enemies who are armed with knives and guns!