I don’t really want to write this review. I’d rather share the first chapter of a mystery novel I write on the spot. Or give you a list of my favourite words - plethora comes out top. Maybe I rank all the Taylor Swift albums from ‘best’ to ‘very good but not best’. But I’m here, reviewing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jett: The Far Shore. I’ll be brief - Jett did not work.
I was gi🎐ven over a month lead time on Jett - this is the longest lead time I’ve ever been given on a game ahead of launch. What’s more, PR also included a rough ‘time to beat’ - another rarity. 12 hours, it was suggested, so enough to sink my teeth into without it being a slog. I’ve played Jett for ten hours and I’m still in the first chapter after the prologueꦓ. That’s not because it’s hard, but because it’s broken.
I typically ma🍒ke it a rule not to score games I do not finish, by whatever metric ‘finish’ may mean in a certain genre. Earlier this year, I delayed my scored review of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut on PlayStation 5 because of the buggy launch. I’ll extend Jett the same courtesy, although even when it worked, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed it much.
Consider this an unscored review, or an impressions piece, or a warning - whichever you prefer. All I can say is I can’t in good faith recommend it right now, and I don’t w🐟ant to dunk on an indie gꩲame that bent over backwards to make my life easier.
I don’t talk to other critics about games I’m reviewing until the reviews are out. Occasionally, if I’m stuck, I might message someone I know is playing and just check if I’m being an idiot. I was not stuck on Jett. It just didn’t work. I know🅠, from seeing other people discreetly ask ꦗfor help on Twitter, that others got themselves stuck. I also know from the replies that others still have finished it - a Herculean task I was not up to. Perhaps I did something early on to activate the motherlode of bugs, and everyone else has been just dandy. But I can’t review the game they played, or the game I might have played if everything worked. I can only review my game.
Jett started off fine. You play a prologue tutorial that teaches you all about flying. The ship feels zippy as you skid across the water, letting you move with agility and guile. However, any sort of comp🤡lex manoeuvring - like turning - is arduous.
After a short, first person walking section, you’re back flying again on a different planet. Immediately,𒅌 flying is worse. This is deliberate, in fairness, with repairing your ship one of your first tasks, but Jett ultimately is game about flying around in a litt🌳le ship. It’s weird that the game deliberately makes this less enjoyable with sudden restrictions. You can only boost for so long without picking up orbs, but with steering clunky and slow, good luck on that. You need to hop up ledges, but the control is poor. Your ship has a shield that I assume becomes necessary later on, but initially it just slows you down and makes movement even more frustrating.
During the first major quest, I was given 20 minutes to explore the island. Nothing to find, just 20 minutes to explore. I’m not sold on games that say ‘do what you want!’ anyway, but I could survey this whole island in five. With three minutes left on the clock, the countdown froze. I could still fly, but progress was impossi𝔍ble. A quick restart - soon to become a theme - and I had to spend the 20 minutes exploring again.
That at least gave me proof I hadn’t missed anything - I barely explored at all this time, and 20 real-time minutes later, my objective was met. Next, some busywork, then my shop broke - this was intentional, with the mission being to fix it. During this mission, you splutter around the island, then eventually find a safe place to land. Can you guess what happened next readers? One quick restart later - thankfully loading just afteꦆr the 20 minute exploration - it broke again. I started to worry it was me, but after a third attempt, it finally worked.
I think you get the idea. There were incidents too; an enemy bugged off the map in a combat section, the dialogue wheel🦋 stuck which stopped me from leaving the conversation, objectives failed to register as complete, and so on. I was able to force my way through the next section in the same stop start way, but after still not completing the first chapter in ten hours, I called it quits. Perhaps this review would be more legitimate had I battled through 40 hours more, but that would be a lot of time just to come back to you with ‘game broke’.
If you want a lightning quick review of the basic elements, here it is. The ar🎀tstyle has a strange, brutalist vibe that some people will enjoy, but I did not. Ditto the oddly overly emotive dialogue flourishes. The soundtrack is fine, and probably lands better if the rest of the game wasn’t so frustrating. Flying is a bigger chore than it needed to be, but enjoyable when everything is firing. The controls of everything else were far too fiddly.
Jett, ultimately, is a game I cannot review. A complete reinstall and several restarts couldn’t save it. I hope I was alone in this - I hope everyone else🌼’s game worked. Mine didn’t. I can’t put a rating on that. I can just advise you not to buy it.