Contrary to popular belief, lemmings aren't suicidal. They love life. Gorillas aren't aggressive, either, so there's no reason to believe that a member of this species – even a gigantic one – would be at all interested in abducting a human female and throwing barrels of fire at a human male. Neither of these facts, however, makes the games Lemmings and Donkey Kong any less fun to play.
Video game premises are often absurd, and Jump: Free Running upholds the tradition with straight-faced gusto. Employing the modern phenomenon of urban obstacle negotiation as its theme, it makes the striking claim that the best way to carry out maintenance on buildings is to clamber up walls and leap intrepidly from rooftop to rooftop like a livid baboon.
Set on a series of edifices in San Francisco, London, and Cairo, each of Jump's missions opens with a story-based scenario. In San Francisco, an earthquake has caused several gas leaks, and the only way avert disaster is to cut off the gas supply by pulling an array of rooftop levers. With your feet. By running along the wall.
In London, utility workers' strikes have caused a widespread power outage, with the consequence that burglars are in swarm. The only way to dispel them is to switch on several emergency lights. With your feet. By running along the wall.
In Cairo, meanwhile, flash fires are sweeping through the city. Buildings are ablaze, and the only way to put them out is to smash the windows of their top storeys. With your feet. By running along the wall.
Jump is in some ways a wildly inventive game, producing from its simple premise sleeve a whole bouquet of scenarios. Unfortunately, though, this desperate inventiveness is more or less confined to the storylines. Under the surface, every level is the same.
Once you've received your brief, you set off across the isometric rooftops, the rest of the city scrolling along in the distance. When you reach the end of a rooftop, a power meter appears at the bottom of the screen and an arrow slides along it. To execute the perfect jump, you need to press '2' when the arrow is at the centre of the bar, much like taking a swing in a golf game.
Before you land, another meter appears and you have to follow the same steps again, this time pressing '8' to pull off a tidy skydiving roll.
The power meter control system is a novel and ingenious application of the one-button principle, compensating for the awkwardness of the directional controls by placing greater stress on timing.
Along the way there are poles that you can leap and grab on to by pressing '5', and others that you need to duck beneath by pressing '8'. The switches that you switch, the panes that you break, and the levers that you pull are predominantly situated on vertical surfaces, so to reach them you have to time a brief wall run, and, because you can't turn back, if you mistime a run you have to gallop impotently onwards, potentially unable to meet the level's quota of switches.
Rather than confine the action to a single lane, Jump situates switches on three. Which lane you choose largely depends on whether you have a preference for balancing along poles – again a matter of keeping an arrow inside a power meter – or leaping from rooptops.
The right lane, though, is the one with the most switches in it, since you need to flip a certain number before you reach the end of the level. Infuriatingly, it's not only impossible to tell in advance which lane contains the switches you need, but once you're in a lane you're often stuck in it, condemned to watch switches glide tauntingly past in the other two.
As a result, Jump is a strange beast. Like an inexperienced traceur, it seems to have misjudged the distance between the discrete towers of slick reaction and plodding memory, and finds itself now wedged into the separating alley, one foot on either wall, pleading for help.
Metaphor aside, the game merits a look for being a unique and ingenious mobile conversion. It's just a shame that workmanlike graphics and sound, repetitive play, and some glaring weaknesses in level design don't bear out its early promise.
Jump: Free Running
While Jump makes some impressive leaps with its innovative control system, it stumbles over the basics of level design. Definitely worth a look, even if you find yourself looking elsewhere before long
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though, following a departure in late December 2015.