If present day Hollywood has a reputation for churning out garbage, then the same can be said for the movie-tie in game industry as they’re cut from the same turd-stained cloth. More often than not movie tie-in games are just expensive cash grabs meant to be advertisements for the movies they loosely follow than actually trying to be…you know…good. Or even complimentary! But one could also say that the movies themselves are just meant to be toy commercials. Look at all the merchandising that comes out months in advance of any new Star Wars, DC or Marvel movie. Or the toys that came out with the release of movies like Aliens, where most of the cast we’re introduced to in the beginning are dead by the halfway mark but they still had action figures made of them.

With that glowing introduction, today I’m taking a look at Jumanji: The Video Game. So if you’re a parent watching this – #1 my apologies for my juvenile sense of humor as I really am this immature in real life, and #2 as a rule, anything that says “The Video Game” as part of the title is not going to be good. The exception to that is the recently re-released Ghostbusters: The Video Game. That game is insanely good and should be in everybody’s library. Jumanji, on the other hand, is not terrible…but they skimped on so much that the game just doesn’t have much of anything going for it. In fact, it doesn’t really have much of anything at all.

So movie notwithstanding you basically take each of the characters of the movie and search out 4 jewels, then unlock a gate to go to another area. Then you run through a hall with some traps while collecting 4 more jewels. Then, you stand next to a statue to power it up while shooting bad guys. Then you go to the next area, another hall with more traps. Then you shoot guys while powering up a statue again. Then you complete the level by walking through one more gate. And that’s it. That’s the whole game. I’m not joking.

When you fire up the game for the first time it’ll ask if you want to go through the tutorial first, and some guy who looks like Dax Shephard will guide you through how everything works, and the game doesn’t add anything else onto it. If you play through the tutorial, that’s like 90% of the game. So once again, you can play through the tutorial, return the game, and feel confident that you didn’t miss out on anything.

The game, if you want to call it that, has this same loop throughout 4 maps. 2 of those maps are the same area, but one’s at night. So you could argue it’s only 3 maps. So after you’ve played through those maps, that’s it. All you do then is play the same maps repeatedly to unlock some costumes that are just color swapped versions of what you already have on and some new weapon skins. And during my playtime, that grind was kinda slow. For something with such simple gameplay, I would figure the grind to go up in rank would’ve been a little faster to keep players interested, but I guess they went the opposite route to pad the time you’ll spend on it. That, folks, was not the route to take.

The computer will constantly run in front of you to take shots at enemies and it really feels like its #1 priority is to just stay in front of you at all times.

I have to mention how bad the AI of your team is. The computer will constantly run in front of you to take shots at enemies and it really feels like its #1 priority is to just stay in front of you at all times.  I mean if it were a person I’d think they were doing this intentionally to make me angry!

Also animals in this are 1 hit kills. Didn’t run from a hippo in time? Dead. Rhino touch you? Dead. And there’s no real indication you’ve been hit other than that suddenly your screen goes dark and there’s the respawn timer that shows up. Otherwise they’re the only real danger in the game. The enemies aren’t particularly bright and if they’re not shooting at you from behind cover they’ll run out you as if they want you to shoot them in the face to get them out of the game. We figured out that on Easy and Medium difficulty, you could just run through the traps without really trying to dodge anything and you won’t die, and the health packs at the end of each trap hall give you enough health to do it all over again.

So does anything in this work? Well functionally the game isn’t terrible. The gameplay is simple enough and controls fine. The graphics are colorful and have a slightly cartoony feel to them, and they mostly got the looks of the actors pretty well. They still look slightly different but that didn’t really bug me. The Rock and Kevin Hart both have this look on their faces like they gambled and lost. The original actors didn’t voice their characters, which nobody should be surprised at because it would’ve been obscenely expensive, though the voice actors that played them did a good job. Or maybe it’s just that easy to impersonate Jack Black and Kevin Hart. I could go either way there. I do want to point out that you’ll hear the same 4-5 phrases from them throughout each game session regardless. Be prepared to hear each character complain about their weapon power ups going away at least a dozen times each time you play.

So. I gave it a score but does it even matter at this point? I guess the nicest thing I can say about the game is that it’s so easy, that if you have little kids that want to play it and like couch co-op games, there’s no real violence in this and it’s simple enough to teach them some teamwork, and they’ll like the colorful graphics. But if you’re an adult, give it a pass. You’re not getting some story-based movie game or some version of the Jumanji board game or whatnot. You’re getting something that actually probably started as a decent concept for a couch co-op game, and then 2 hours later was finished and sent to the publisher. Or maybe they accidentally sent the demo to the publisher and decided to just not say anything.