Jumping Joe & Friends

Given its simplicity and bright presentation, it's best recommended for a younger audience.

All in all, Jumping Joe and Friends is your typical smartphone experience – shallow, repetitive and lacking any real hook to keep you playing. Even the multiplayer wears out its welcome in a matter of minutes. The list of excellent or just fun Switch titles is already a long one and continues to grow with every passing week. Any one of those would be a better investment than Jumping Joe and Friends.

Very basic but highly approachable, with an addictive gameplay hook and cheap entry fee, Jumping Joe & Friends is a strong candidate for impulse purchasing on Nintendo Switch eShop, and offers more depth than its basic aesthetic would suggest. Online connectivity would have done wonders for potential replay value, but for pick-up-and-play Switch gaming, this one is hard to beat.

There are plenty of solid mobile ports on Switch–see Riptide GP: Renegade and Astro Duel Deluxe–but Jumping Joe & Friends is not one of them. The local multiplayer is the game's best feature, but ultimately the game is just way too bland.

If its simplicity is more than welcome when it comes to pic up and play, it risks making the game way too repetitive after a short amount of time, whether on solo or multiplayer, and that makes it feel like this gae could be more compelling and involving than it actually is.

Jumping Joe and Friends is a fun arcade-style minimalist platformer that is fun in short burst as you try to beat your high score, collecting a ton of diamonds along the way. Those of you with kids will get the most out of your purchase since your little ones will have a lot of fun as they give it their best effort.

Jumping Joe & Friends is well developed and fun, but by its very nature is not the type of game you'll play with any degree of frequency. It's more like those board games you find stashed away on the upper shelf of the closet and think, “Hey, I remember this! This was fun!” But then you get it down and play a few rounds and soon remember why it had been up on that shelf for so long.

Jumping Joe & Friends is a simple phone game ported to the Switch. It controls well and can be fun in short bursts. Given that the Switch can be a portable system this can be a good fit depending on how you feel about these style of games. Just know that the $4.99 price point may be too high if you are looking for something with any substance to it.

Jumping Joe and Friends embraces simplicity, requiring enduring vigilance as it challenges the player to accumulate as many points as possible. The result? Not only a tense arcade platformer, but a reasonable party game that suits the Switch's pick-up-and-play charm.

The object in the game is pretty simple, you just want to jump right or left to go up platforms, slowly taking you higher and into more challenging zones...