In the wake of two surpise hit games with The Maw and Splosion Man, Twisted Pixel bolstered their staff and began the road to releasing their next downloadable title, Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley. Promising a more fully-featured game than their rather simplistic, yet still very enjoyable previous titles, Comic Jumper, at least to start with, seems to deliver exactly that. As the game wore on, however, I seemed to pick up on more than a few patterns and themes that became all too familiar.

First and foremost, what I was looking forward to most with Comic Jumper was Twisted Pixel's unique brand of humor. Take for example Captain Smiley, an emoticon on steroids with a talking star on his chest. Intentionally cheesy and handing out winks and nods like nobody's business, Captain Smiley and his crass life-mate Star do not fail to impress. It is rare to find a game that can genuinely make me laugh out loud, but there were a few times during this adventure that had me going so much I had to hit pause for a minute before continuing on my way.

However, there were some sections where it just seemed like Twisted Pixel decided to try and cram in as many memes and pop culture references as possible, hoping everyone would get at least one. For example, during one 5 minute stretch there were references to Back to the Future, Armageddon, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Armageddon again, and Superman. Sometimes you have to know how to say when.

Visually, Twisted Pixel hit the nail on the head with this game. The default art style looks ripped right from the pages of a comic and each successive set of levels fit nicely with the genre of comics they are meant to take place in. However the once place where the visual styling gets in the way is when it comes to distinguishing what can be climbed on and what can't. I fell to my death many times because the bar I was climbing on suddenly ended while I was busy shooting things.

Speaking of shooting things, I hope you're a fan, because you'll be doing a lot of it. The majority of Comic Jumper's gameplay is styled after run and gun classics like Contra and Gunstar Heroes. Several sections change up the pace with brawling, behind the back shooting, and shmup-inspired gameplay, but the majority of the time you will be running and jumping side to side while shooting things. In between missions or "issues" as things are divided, you control Captain Smiley around his base of operations with oppotunities to speak with characters, participate in challenge missions to make some extra cash, and spend that cash on upgrades and bonuses (like new Splosion Man levels!) .

When I spoke with Twisted Pixel CEO Mike Wilford at PAX East earlier this year, I asked him about what kind of difficulty we could expect from Comic Jumper. He responded that it would be somewhere between The Maw and Splosion Man, to which I would have to wholeheartedly disagree. Comic Jumper is hard. Hard enough I thought at first that I might just suck at games, but a quick check of the leaderboards proved otherwise. The manic pace with which enemies and projectiles are thrown at you from all sides forces you to constantly be on the move and keep your finger held firmly on the fire button. There were multiple times where I had to take breaks to led my trigger finger uncramp.

One of the things that made games like Gunstar Heroes so much fun was that although a massive amount of enemies came at you from all sides, they mostly all died in one hit. Add to this realtively short levels and you had a game that always kept moving. In Comic Jumper, not only are the levels a little padded for length, you have to shoot enemies a minimum of 3 times to destroy them and none of these shots will stun them. This unfortunately leads to a lot of desparately pointing in certain directions for much longer than you need to. In addition, your melee attack is mapped to the same button as your guns, so you will actually need to stop shooting in order to quickly tap the button before resuming what you were doing. Another odd control design is how you jump while climbing overhead pipes. Simply pressing the jump button will actually cause Captain Smiley to drop into the pit below. You need to press Up and Jump in order to do what one button probably should.

I've already mentioned to a few people that I am very glad to be writing this review for Bitmob so that I do not have to give Comic Jumper a score. While the witty characters and goregous art can be entrancing at times, the repetitive gameplay and biting difficulty coupled with some quirky control choices can lead to a bit of a frustrating experience. Comic Jumper is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination and well worth it's $15 price point, but just know going in that not everything is all smiles.

Full Disclosure: A copy of this game was provided to me for review by Twisted Pixel