Juju

One day I was thinking to myself, ‘I haven’t played a decent platformer for ages,’ and I was scrolling through the most recent bout of Xbox Live sales and came across Juju. A quick glance at my True Achievements profile told me that it was a moderately easy platform game so would fit the bill perfectly. I have to admit that it wasn’t particularly high up my next to play list, but I finished Crash Time 4 and couldn’t be bothered to get up and put another game in console. So I just played Juju as it was installed on my Hard Drive.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really pay much attention to the opening scene of the game. There is a purple bear and he looked happy. I may have fallen asleep. So I then started to play it and the first thing that grabbed my attention was the main menu. Now, the usual main menu will have various words like, ‘New Game’, ‘Settings’, ‘Load Game’ and maybe sometimes ‘Credits’, ‘Achievements’ and ‘Quit.’ Juju has none of these and instead offers a series of symbols which can be down to your own interpretation as to what they do. Basically it’s down to gaming knowledge to know what to click on so I don’t know what a child is supposed to do in this situation.

The basic story is that you have to save your father (a giant panda) from some evil bat thing call Calypso and rebuild some kind of wooden stick that has powers or something. Juju has three main abilities at the start of the game; dashing, jumping and playing the bongos – a unique and pointlessly annoying game mechanic – and you have navigate very slowly through a variety of different environments, jumping from platform to platform, and fighting giant bosses that your small purple bear has no right beating.

The gameplay caused me a great deal of discomfort. As I’ve mentioned above, Juju moves retardedly slowly to the point where getting anywhere is an episode in frustration. Thankfully most of the levels are quite short and are only dragged out by the fact that you have to collect loads of pickups as you go. After playing games like Tomb Raider I think I can now say with some confidence that the connection between me pushing buttons to make Juju jump or dash, and Juju actually doing these things is slightly off and this resulted in me dying a lot. Trying to do the same jump five times and getting five different results was really annoying and this was a frequent occurrence.

There is also an apparent co-op element and I actually read a short article on the game where the creators said they had tried to create something that wasn’t too easy for some gamers but not too hard for others. However, having finished it, I think the creators imagine those two gamers as the same person. Having to combat the shitty controls during the harder optional levels – which are shockingly more difficult that the main game ones – was an episode in screaming for me. So a poorer gamer, i.e. a child, would probably cry. And I also don’t think a child would find the main game difficult at all. So what I’m saying is it was a nice try but it failed spectacularly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

There are 19 achievements to get while playing Juju and 8 of them can be obtained through main story progression.  There are 4 achievements for doing specific things while playing the game; hitting 3 enemies with one dash; making 4 enemies dance at once; completing a level without losing any hearts (without being hit) and getting through a level without picking up any pick-ups. This last one is actually quite challenging as pick up are pretty much everywhere and you have to avoid them all.

There is one achievement for completing a level in co-op and because I have no friends I’m willing to subject my compulsive habits to, I did this replaying the first level with two controllers.

The last six achievements are for getting all the coins and completing all the bonus levels. This is where the game goes from stupidly easy to stupidly hard thanks in part to the games controls. At one point you get the ability to swim underwater and while underwater levels are constantly slated in many other games, this really does take the biscuit. You have to swim away from instant death as bear than can only dash away in a straight horizontal line whilst having to avoid seemingly unavoidable obstacles which would otherwise be avoidable if you could dash diagonally. Really irritating.

Having to collect all the coins was really, really repetitive. There are three secret teleports in every level that take you to one of six different mini game-like collect-‘em-all puzzles. There are 72 teleports throughout the game and only six mini-game variants. Doing the same six levels 12 times each isn’t exactly excitement central.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the repetition, Juju is still a relatively quick completion. That doesn’t say a lot about the game though considering how repetitive it is. The difficulty curve between the main levels and unlockable levels is really jarring. By itself this isn’t a bad thing but I think it’s down to the level designs not being in sync with the controls available so it’s a design failure in my eyes.