The Good
- Charming visuals and art work
- Magikarp
- Magikarp
The Bad
- Very repetitive game play
- Weird overpriced Microtransaction Model
- Shallow Gameplay
In Depth
Pokemon Go isn’t the only mobile Pokemon Experience available on mobile, Pokemon Magikarp Jump is a much more traditional mobile game with all of the usual caveats that come along with that. At it’s core, Magikarp Jump is just your traditional old school Tomagotchi only with Pokemon. You fish up a Magikarp, you feed it food and train it, and then take it off to compete in a Jumping contest against AI Magikarp opponents. That’s 100% of the extend of the game.
The best part of this whole game is the art and animation. It’s repetitive yes, but it all looks really great. There are several dozen Pokemon that show up in the game aside from Magikarps, all of them rendered in this recognizable cutesy art style.
The more you play the more coin rewards you get which allows you to upgrade the various foods and training courses. There are also Diamonds which are this games Premium currency, which can be used to unlock Friend Pokemon and decorations for your Magikarp tank. The friendly Pokemon offer time based rewards such as bonus experience (JP or Jump Power) or extra coins. The Decorations offer passive bonuses such as a blanked percentage bonus to coins or JP. This offers up some variety of ways to raise your Magikarp. The Premium currency can be purchased for real money but it also can be earned, slowly, by simply playing the game. After training, and league matches, you often encounter random events, some of which drop diamonds, others bonus exp and gold.
There is choice, and not really a lot of choice. To keep things moving, you really need to keep upgrading food and training, which means needing gold, which pretty much steers all upgrades into getting more gold. Spending a few hundred hard to get Diamonds for 2 extra food isn’t really as useful as spending the same amount for a bonus to gold drops or even just a boost to the experience food gives.
The whole system is of course, also designed on a sliding scale, so you get stronger, but you never really feel like you are getting “better”. The leagues (all ten of them) all play out essentially at the same pace until you reach Level 100 Magikarps. Every match is the same and entirely dependent on having more experience than your opponent, which is a fixed amount. The only real way to make things move faster is to drop real world money.
Which brings up some weirdness. There is a spending limit, built in, it’s something like $50 ever. I suppose it’s to prevent kids from blowing hundreds on the game, except the entire point of this business model is to be sustained by “whales” IE the people who spend hundreds of dollars, to make up for those trudging through at the Free pace. Spending $50 also gives you the Diamond Miner, which grants 100 free Diamonds per day, which pretty much enables all of the unlocks to be purchased many orders of magnitude faster than playing for Free. the amount of Diamonds you get on basic purchases is also pretty low, enough to buy maybe 1 item. Essentially the only reason to buy in, is for the Diamond Miner.
The problem here is, game doesn’t have anywhere near $50 worth of game play. I get that some people will feel it does, but speaking for the idea of the vast majority, it doesn’t. You don’t do anything interactive at all side from tapping food and pressing OK a lot. Maybe, MAYBE if the Training rounds were actual mini games and you maybe some extra taps or something to help jump more in League battles and just in general if there was SOMETHING besides being a time waster to the game. There isn’t though, and as it stands, being a time waster is ok, but it’s not really $50 ok. I’m all for supporting developers, and I’d gladly throw $5-$10 at this game for the time I’ve spent on it and the enjoyable art and animation.
After you reach level 100 you can keep training Magikarps to higher and higher experience to see how high you can get your Magikarp to jump. There’s no direct player vs player aspect but connecting to Facebook lets you see how your friends are ranking.
Don’t get me wrong on the negatives, the game is pretty fun as a Tomagotchi time waster, it just feels like there are some odd choices in the pay model and the gameplay itself just, completely lacks any real depth. I have enjoyed the game a lot. I’ve played all the way through to Level 100, which, takes months, just as a heads up, but it’s more than doable. It just gets old after a while.
