Jetboard Joust is a weird game that flounders like a fish out of water. Don't be fooled by its sharp retro aesthetics and vibrant art—there's a lot going wrong under the hood. You may be able to wrangle its chaotic gameplay and eradicate its volatile enemies in the first few stages, but gradually Jetboard Joust spirals into madness, eventually exploding—gleefully—into a fireball of noise, pixels, and flashing lights. Most of the game's issues can fit under the general umbrella of "needs tweaking", but I'm not convinced months of edits and updates could save Jetboard Joust. The rot at Jetboard Joust's heart is less tangible and more philosophical: it doesn't know what to do to make itself fun to play.
In Jetboard Joust, you're tasked with fending off an alien invasion on five worlds, each world comprised of eleven stages. For each stage you'll have to eliminate an unspecified number of alien waves while protecting itty-bitty alien kids from abduction. Should the alien babies get whisked off to the top of the screen, a super strong enemy will spawn... which isn't that big of a deal as a single joust can obliterate it. Sure, you'll lose a little bit of money at the end of the stage as a punishment, but ultimately saving the tiny tots is optional. Hell, it might even be preferable to let some of them get vaporized, considering how often the abduction alarm will be ringing in your ears. That, and the unskippable "civilians saved" animation work towards making you actively detest the helpless dummies you're trying to protect.
Luckily they'll be an afterthought most of the time, as you'll be dealing with a wide variety of alien menaces. As negative as my impressions are for the game, there are a decent amount of weapons and enemies to play around with, both of which expand as you make your way through the campaign. The most common enemy you'll face are fellow jetboarders, which can range from cannon fodder to aerial assassins—depending on what weapons are mounted to the tips of their boards. Like you, jetboarders have access to a huge assortment of armaments—specifically, your armaments. But unlike you, they're not bound by ammunition or feeble human reaction times, allowing them to wipe the floor with you should you misjudge the reach of their firearm. And that'll happen a lot, given how absurdly chaotic the screen gets as enemies rapidly populate it, all of them salivating for your demise.
Jetboard Joust's obsession with swarming the player is the first of its many pitfalls, as it turns the game's later worlds into an indecipherable gamble. Both the number of waves and enemies contained therein increase the further you get into the game, to the point that a single screen can be jam-packed with twenty or thirty foes you need to be reacting to. Worse yet is that enemies can vary wildly in firepower, capable of dealing anywhere from a sliver of damage to half of your health bar, and you have nearly no invulnerability frames, which allows a single misread to tank a run. Not since Wizard of Legend have I played a game where death is so effortlessly paid out to the player!
That's not to say Jetboard Joust is a hard game however, as it's fairly lax outside of a few glaring instances. Health and ammo are guaranteed to drop as long as you're doing a little bit of damage to your foes, a merciful mechanic that you'll need in order to survive the game's longer waves and boss fights. You'll heal to full health in between each stage and saving up enough money will allow you to purchase an extra life if you happen to fall in battle. Plus you're guaranteed an extra life before the big boss fight that caps off each world, which you can use to get a good handle on their capabilities.
But the real crapshoot is in the game's guardian battles: special encounters that occur at the end of individual levels. The enemy pool for this is vast and fairly random, handing you anything from easily-dispatched trash mobs to a battalion of Enforcers: enemies that can easily demolish you even with your best weapon at the ready. God forbid they warp in with a sniper rifle or shotgun, because in either case you'll be space dust in seconds. Almost no other game I can think of has such polarizing finales, where defeat or victory can be determined in the first five shots—and you often have no idea on which side you'll end up on until the particle effects finally fade.
Of course, even during some easy encounters you'll still have a chance to bite the big one, largely because parsing the game's visuals is a challenge unto itself (turn off screen shake ASAP!!!) While screenshots make it look sleek, Jetboard Joust's adherence to two primary colors creates a lot of unintended noise on the battlefield, especially since a lot of the info given to you (ammo, health, lives, abductions) is presented in the same monochrome shade. At the very least, the game needed to offer the player character more colors in order to make them stand out more easily; having each weapon come with its own unique palette would've been an easy way to tell which armament you have equipped, instead of forcing you to rely on a small text blurb at the top right.
Jetboard Joust's weapons are unfortunately another aspect that ratches up the game's zany factor, ranging from Goldeneye's klobb-esque tickle machines to screen-clearing explosions. Two weapons will be granted to you at the start of a run and then you'll have to seek out the rest on the map selection screen, often foregoing valuable treasure or upgrades to do so. This pushes the player to rely on the armaments they're randomly given, especially since any new weapons acquired arrive at their lowest level, requiring thousands of dollars of investment to get up to snuff. But in an effort to get you to swap weapons often, Jetboard Joust reduces your ammunition to a comical degree, granting only a few shots before you have to change your weapons up. And did I mention you can only carry a single weapon at a time? The rest of your firepower will be scattered around the stage as tiny pick-ups, blending into the background and often getting in the way of much-needed power-ups like health and ammo. In order to survive you'll have to swap weapons constantly, especially when you start to rub up against the game's wholly unnecessary durability system (yes, really) in later worlds.
The only other weapons innate to your standard board are a largely ineffectual pea shooter with infinite ammo and the titular joust ability. Jousting is a neat concept—it's a high-powered horizontal attack that's doubles as both a dash and bomb—but when and where joust restocks pop up are completely random. At times you'll be well-stocked and able to joust across the screen to your heart's content, but other times you'll be frantically searching for a single drop in order to safely dispose of a pursuing Enforcer. Along with your weapons, you're able to upgrade your jousts (and armor) for an increasingly high price—but where weapons scale asymptotically jousts scale linearly, meaning they'll be a sunk cost for the endgame. At that point jousts are mainly used as a quick escape so you can go surface skimming for the right power-up.
While most of the game is a kaleidoscope of exploding pixels, boss fights are where Jetboard Joust's high-octane madness slows to a crawl. These head honchos have an awful combination of bad traits: every boss is equipped with astronomically high health and hard to hit weak points, factors which are barely tolerable on their own but a waking nightmare when paired together. Without the right weapon fights can go on forever, as none of the bosses (besides the last) are effective at killing you, let alone hitting you. Sadly, you'll be struggling to hit them too, blowing through your best weapon's ammo as they rapidly jiggle around the screen. Eventually you'll get lazy and slip-up, all in an attempt to speed the process along, and maybe even dying—which means you'll have to do the fight all over again from the beginning! Worse yet is that bosses can appear randomly in stage waves later on—and sometimes multiple in the same wave! It's completely random!
All of these flaws meld together to form a game that feels barely enjoyable, but what really kills my desire to touch the game again is its padded length. Jetboard Joust is interminably long for an arcade shooter, taking roughly four hours to beat if you know what you're doing. Add in the fact that it's a permadeath roguelite and you'll feel like putting it down for good when you die three hours into your run on the last world. Thankfully you can unlock warps to future stages as you play through the game, but you won't be able to keep your prior upgrades and weapons. Instead—bafflingly!—you'll be given a random assortment of better weapons and upgrades, meaning you're almost encouraged to die and start from each warp point in case you're having trouble. Sure, it robs you of the true ending, but you'll have to play the game from start to finish without warps to achieve that. And considering that every stage is exactly the same barring which enemies spawn in and where, you'll have felt like you've played the game ten times over by the first time you reach its end.
Like a moth to a flame, I continued to play Jetboard Joust, even after I knew I wasn't going to enjoy it. But I was curious just how much craziness was left, as the horizon burst into coins, laser beams, and random doodads scattered about the floor. In a way I was reminded of some horrendously balanced PS2 games like Chaos Legion or Extermination, in how they urge you to press on because you don't know how it could get worse—but you know that it will. Given how much love and attention was poured into Jetboard Joust I feel it's unfair to simply write it off as a bad game, but I know one thing: it certainly isn't a good one.
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