

The score display at the top is no doubt meant to be the metric with which you gauge how high you’ve reached, but as you get higher and higher, the number grows to such a large number in such strange intervals that it’s hard to gauge how well you’re doing at all. The moment your jelly takes its first jump, you’re already given an inordinate amount of points to match that small bit of height it achieved. The main problem with how Happy Jump taps into this is how it represents how high you’ve jumped, that being it conveys it obtusely when it bothers to convey it at all. Endless jumpers are usually about trying to jump as high as you can before you mess up and lose, with the appeal of doing better next time driving you to play again and again.


The first thing it somehow fails at is the primary goal of the game. If you wish to make this your endless jumper of choice though, the walls start tumbling down, and Happy Jump reveals just how dull it truly is. So long as you can keep jumping, you can keep playing, and there is no doubt that many people who just downloaded this game and played it for a few minutes were satisfied. There are even golden apples that are more effective but much rarer to help you get even higher.įor a casual player, Happy Jump does exactly what you would expect of an endless jumper. The biggest boosts though come from apples, where they launch you high up and make you invulnerable as well, letting you kill the flies and gain some height. The game will even have areas where you can only ascend by bouncing off of floating coins, with the special large coins giving extra cash and a bigger boost. While you’re jumping, you can also collect coins that will be spent in the in-game shop for visual upgrades to your jelly or to give you boosts at the start of the round, with the coins even giving you a small boost upward as they’re collected. One of the goals of the game seems to be trying to get as high as possible before your demise, although the only obstacle besides platform placement are some flies that will buzz back and forth and can kill you instantly on contact. If you fall too far off the bottom of the screen, any ground that was there before has disappeared and you will lose your current session. The platforms in Happy Jump are fairly simple grass covered rectangles, although some will move back and forth and others will crumble after you take your first jump off of them. The screen wraps around to make jumping a bit easier, with your jelly able to jump off either edge of the screen and appear back in play on the opposite side. Any time the jelly hits a platform they’ll jump again, and to keep them alive you need to make sure they always land somewhere safe. As soon as you start a play session, your little red jelly character will begin bounding up and down on their own, and by tilting your device left or right, you can guide the jumps to land on platforms to help it get higher. Happy Jump sticks to the basics of the endless jumper.

Like most any popular mobile game though, imitators and iterators leaped onto this popular genre to try and get their slice of the pie, and that is no doubt how a game like Happy Jump was born. Doodle Jump helped to popularize the Endless Jumper genre on mobile platforms, its gameplay style simple, addictive, and easy to return to after a long time away.
