Abstract and minimalist, Jumping Line Plus is an extension from a mobile game that’s made its way to Desura and has toyed at my brain for a while. The whole thing is so simple it’s quite a sham really. You are a line that will constantly jump. You control with your mouse exactly where the line will land for its next bounce. What starts off as a simple platform game very quickly moves into a button and environmental puzzler as you have to navigate different blocks and platforms that have different properties. Some are effected by gravity, some have on and off switches, some move plains (ala LittleBigPlanet’s three lanes) and others dissolve. The game does very well at introducing a concept, pushing it at you with new difficulty levels two or three times and then moving to something new.
Jumping Line Plus is polished up to scratch by two other things. Firstly the controls. It takes a few bounces to get to grips with it but you can control things with ease once you’ve understood the lines normal trajectory. The second is that there is some relatively bland music in the background that changes and flourishes when certain events happen. It just makes you feel like theirs more to the game the simply aiming and hoping.
Positives
-Clean and abstract in design and visual style
-Solid physics for its own world
-Not many cheap deaths
Negatives
-Relatively short
Conclusion
A short game that is made less of a challenge with its generous checkpoint system and lack of a score which makes it difficult to make a challenge to others elsewhere. However the core game itself is actually quite fun as a mild distraction and I’ve found myself returning to it many times for that five-minute fix before starting something bigger.