JUMANJI: The Curse Returns

Description

26 years after the iconic film, you can now play the Jumanji board game, based on the 1995 classic, on mobile! It’s casual co-op fun for up to 4 players. ABOUT THE GAME A game for those who seek to find a way to leave their world behind… experience the Jumanji board game based on the 1995 film. The game combines the classic board game with exciting time attack, card matching mechanics. Roll the dice and read the riddle! Every round is a race against time to banish the danger as a team and reach the centre of the board. In the face of crocodiles, elephants and rhinos, rescue your friends from creeping vines and dodge the hunter, Van Pelt. Test your skills • The Jumanji board game contains a mysterious jungle. With every roll of the dice dangers escape into the town and can only be stopped by finishing the game. Be careful, if the jungle overpowers you and your team - everyone loses • ROLL THE DICE TO MOVE YOUR TOKEN - DOUBLES GETS ANOTHER TURN - REACH THE CENTER TO WIN… • ADVENTURERS BEWARE: DO NOT BEGIN UNLESS YOU INTEND TO FINISH… Stand together and face the creatures and plants the Jumanji riddle summons into the world • Cycle through your deck and match the items to the danger to banish them back into the board. • Use the items wisely and rescue your friends from jungle vines, and protect yourself with the magical shield. • Manage token magic - your token will charge whenever you use a magical flask. When it’s fully charged you can use it against any danger, or banish Van Pelt in a single move. • Use bonus items: add valuable seconds to your fight, and team-up points when you help a friend escape vines or gift magical objects. It takes working together to get a Team-Up All-Out Attack! • Collect gems as you travel around the board and choose magical abilities, including extra Team-Up points when helping friends, reduced damage from Van Pelt’s attacks, and the ability to deal extra damage when battling vines! Cooperate in real-time Your team will face more than one threat in every round. While you battle jungle creatures, twisting vines will try to ensnare you and your friends, and you must help each other to escape. Watch out for the hunter, Van Pelt, you’ll also need to dodge his attacks! Team up One of you must reach the center of the board to win the game, and it takes teamwork to get that far. Do you have fewer players? AI companions will join to complete your team. Anyone can play It’s so quick and easy to pick up, anyone can play! Join your friends for co-op fun online, gather around the digital board anywhere, anytime, and start your cursed adventure. FEATURES • SIX different characters to choose from • SEVEN dangers ready to stop you from finishing the game • FIVE locations you must defend - if you lose them all, you lose the game • A choice of player tokens, each connected to the mysterious heart of Jumanji • An original soundtrack by award-winning film composer, Christopher Willis The Season Pass The Season Pass will include: new Maps and DLC expansions coming soon. • AVAILABLE NOW - 3 exclusive tokens: the Hippo, Snake and Zebra. • COMING SOON - Play Jumanji on 6 new Maps. Each will include 5 new locations, 2 new characters, 2 new tokens, and a new danger to defeat! • COMING SOON - The first new Map, Winter Lodge, will be an icy departure from the sunny town of Brantford, and the Jumanji jungle will not be put off by the cold! • COMING SOON - DLC Expansions: JUMANJI: Welcome to the Jungle and JUMANJI: The Next Level. About Marmalade Game Studio Marmalade Game Studio is an award winning independent developer and publisher of games based in London, UK and Lisbon, Portugal. Marmalade are the makers of best selling quality digital multiplayer board games. With Marmalade games it doesn’t matter if you’re together or apart, you can find the fun with people you know or players around the world. For quality time, look for the Marmalade Game Studio logo.

Reviews

2 stars for nostalgia, no replay value

The game looks fine (mostly) but the actual gameplay leaves MUCH to be desired. Much like the real-world Jumanji tie-in board game, defeating enemies boils down to matching symbols (here it’s a random “stack” of icons in lieu of dice) before the time runs out — which might be okay, if it worked correctly. More often than not the symbol on my stack is marked green (to indicate it can be used on an enemy and/or another player) but there is *nowhere* to send it (drag the icon from the stack to the enemy/etc) — after a handful of games I’ve realized it’s usually just out of sync, the enemy matching the symbol not having been generated yet by the game. With less than a minute on the clock, any time spent hovering a finger over the screen until a new enemy spawns is a massive waste. Untimed encounters suffer from the incomprehensible idea to have the enemies constantly spitting out vines to ensnare the team — the tutorial makes it seem as if those vines are only a concern if/when the red timer on an enemy’s HP icon runs out (and indeed, the enemies do barf up another mass of vines when this occurs — so what’s the point to this style of encounters except guaranteeing a location will be lost?) Once Van Pelt, the hunter, drops into the game, all encounters become a big mess of trying to fling icons across every inch of the screen. Dragging matched icons onto enemies/players is finicky at best — sometimes the icon lands, and sometimes it feels like a pixel hunt, which, again, is a waste of time in a timed game (not to mention it likely renders the game impossible to play for potential players who may not have the dexterity to drag an icon from Point A to an exact, tiny range of pixels across the screen). Graphics are fine, but nothing on the screen has any character whatsoever. The player avatars might as well be Clue pawns, they all behave exactly the same way, and not having to watch all four of them stare dead-eyed at each other between turns would help the dire pacing of the whole experience (you will feel time slipping away from you watching the pawns crawl from one tile to the next). It took me about 3 games to realize the backgrounds were changing from one turn to the next — they’re all conveniently vast, open spaces which barely register once the camera moves in to the team/board. The enemies range from perfectly meh, to “Why is the zebra auditioning to be the next Donkey in Shrek?” No matter the enemy, the victory dance when it inevitably wins is the same: a jarring, jerking motion (sometimes accompanied by the enemy turning red, for reasons?) like the game is having a stroke. I’ve also seen the end-of-game graphics just not happen (hilarious though to see the team twitching & struggling against absolutely nothing when the vines fail to appear) at least three times. I get the idea of making the game challenging — it *should make players want to load a new game & try again, but the gameplay is so butchered, repetitive, and uninspired that there’s no incentive to try again. There’s a decent game in here if the encounters can be refined & some of the fluff trimmed (speed. up. the. pawns.). For now, I’m glad I bought this on mobile & didn’t pay up for the PC/Switch version. Marmalade has an excellent track record, and I hope after an update/two I’ll be able to reevaluate this game & find more to enjoy.

By S. Gresham

Fun but Repetitive

It’s kinda fun at first, but it gets very repetitive very quickly. All of the mini-games are essentially identical. The DLC might help, but at nearly $30 I’m not going to find that out. Still, it looks good and little kids might be diverted for awhile.

By jkeitz