Jack Lumber
Developed by Owlchemy Labs
Jack Lumber is a bizarre little game. You play as a lumberjack on a quest for vengeance against trees after one falls on his Granny and kills her. Playing like a casual mobile game (which I will touch on more a little later), you cut logs in half and avoid hitting innocent woodland creatures as you make your way through a variety of stages in the game. A progression system slowly introduces you to new concepts and types of logs as you move through the game and the gameplay is highly addictive and quite a bit of fun. This game isn’t without it’s faults, but it’s one that I had a lot of fun with.
The gameplay of Jack Lumber is real simple and easy to pick up. If you’ve ever played Fruit Ninja, this is an extremely familiar style. A group of logs fly up from the bottom of the screen and you drag the mouse cursor along the screen to cut them all horizontally in one long line. Once you click on the screen, everything starts moving in slow motion and a timer counts down giving you limited time to complete your line. As the game moves on, logs begin to have curves and bends in them. Some have numbers that require multiple passthroughs. Some can only be cut a certain direction. Others serve as helpful bonuses like the ability to freeze time or explosive barrels that destroy everything in their vicinity. Each world adds a number of variables to the formula and makes sure that the gameplay is never getting overly stale. A ranking system gives the stages replayability to allow you to come back and best your high scores. Online leaderboards help to push you against the competition and an extensive achievement list helps to make sure there is plenty of content in this game. Thanks to a great scoring system, you can earn bonus points by doing things like cutting logs in straight lines without turning and get bonus points for making exceptional cuts. This makes sure that your scores can vary quite a bit from other people and make the leaderboards even more competitive.
Jack Lumber also features a wide range of powerups, cosmetic items, and temporary powerups that can be purchased in the store’s shop. Each time you complete a level, you earn logs which can then be traded in for these items. You also gain logs by completing side quests which will be familiar to anyone that has played a casual mobile game of this style. Some of them just add paintings to your shack and offer no boost to your gameplay while others give you temporary one time boosts to help beat a tricky level or even the ability to put on a beard that makes the game even harder and grants you modifiers to your score. These beards make the game incredibly hard to, at times, an unfair degree. While these are all optional, I can’t imagine someone having fun while using these as it really makes the game far more stressful than casual games should.
Unfortunately, Jack Lumber is a game that began on mobile platforms and it shows. I know this is a subject that has been touched on many times throughout this blog, but it is one that I have a personal issue with and a bit of a frustration. A large trend in the industry right now seems to be porting mobile games to Steam with minimal effort put in to improve on it. I will give this game the benefit of the doubt and say they have added features such as Steam leaderboard support and an extensive list of achievements, but I still have an issue with this game being about double the price it is on mobile platforms for the same amount of content. This price gouging only seems to exist because of the trend in the industry that people will pay more for a console or computer game versus one on a cell phone or tablet. Just because this is true doesn’t mean that this is a smart or fair pricing structure for the consumer. The biggest issue why this bothers me is because it’s obvious this game was built around the ability for microtransactions. Upon research, it seems like this is a game that allows you on mobile platforms to pay extra money to skip grinding out earning of logs to purchase more abilities. What’s real unfortunate here is that these in game prices seem to be built around purchasing currency which is a feature that isn’t even in the Steam version. This causes you to have to grind out for the more expensive items without even having an ability to purchase in-game currency like original intended (Note that I also have an issue with this which you can read about here). I also want to be clear that I don’t have a problem with mobile games being ported to PC, I just feel like they need a justified pricing scheme or added content to be what is in my opinion fair. For an example, Year Walk was a game I recently played that I believed did this well.
Putting all of my gripes with mobile ports aside, this game is a lot of fun and is one that should be played for any interested party. To focus on some of the better things, this game has an amazing sense of humor with great cutscenes and written letters in-game from a variety of characters. It’s very self aware of how silly of a concept it brings to the table and embraces it by taking the humor to a high level. In what feels like an homage to the classic Batman TV show, every time you cut a log a satisfying word pops on the screen to give a bit extra excitement to each successful slice. The art style of the game looks pretty stylized and entertaining and I enjoyed the subtle changes of environments as you move through the game. Casual games usually don’t have a ton of variety, but this one makes a lot of little changes to really make you feel like bigger changes are happening which is just fantastic design on it’s part.
Maybe I just have a sore spot in the gaming industry and this game pushed some of my buttons, but it is still a ton of fun and addicting to play. If you have the ability to buy this on a mobile device, I have a feeling not only is the pricing going to be better, but it also will likely have better and more accurate controls on a touch device. If you want to get it on PC, I suggest holding out for a sale and not necessarily supporting the over 100% price increase of this game. If you’ve ever enjoyed games such as Fruit Ninja, this will be perfect for you and to be honest, a game that I believe has more content and is more fun to play than even that one.
For the boring statistics part of this game, I played it for 1 hour and 4 minutes and completed the first two worlds of stages.
braktheman 