Jack B. Nimble (Review)

Jack B. Nimble is an infinite 2D runner with a classic Gameboy graphical style, Developed and published by Noonan Design. First off I have to mention how much I enjoyed the music in this game, every level is set to its own slamming chiptune track. Every track is fast and hyper, which fits well with an 8-bit Gameboy themed infinite runner. If the music is too obnoxious for you it can be turned off in the options menu, as well as the sound effects and weather effects.

Jack B. Nimble is easy to learn but hard to master, the controls are simple, there's only one button. Press it once to jump and a second time while airborne to use the whip. Jumping can be a little unresponsive sometimes when landing near the edge of a platform after whipping. Whip candles to multiply your score, try to keep up your accuracy by timing your whips right. Accuracy is determined by how many candles you've hit or missed, and is displayed in percentages at the top right corner of the screen, the accuracy of your whips will have a notable effect on your final score. your final score is calculated by distance traveled multiplied by candles whipped multiplied by the overall accuracy of your whips.

Your speed increases the farther you go eventually maxing out at full speed, the only way to slow down is to run through bushes, snow, or water, you can also speed up by running through bonfires or fireballs and catching yourself on fire. You'll have to watch out for crates and rocks, if you hit one it'll kill you and end your run, these are occasionally placed in annoying places, even though the game seems to be part procedurally generated it's still just poorly designed placements and the most irritating part of the game.

There's a decent amount of content here for a $3.00 game. There are six levels to unlock each with their own theme and music, there are eight playable runners to unlock (two of them are secret unlocks), there are ten color palette variations to unlock, and finally there are a few challenges like whipping a total of 100 candles, or unlocking everything in the game. Unlockables are attained by getting a certain total of high-scores, the last two levels require pretty big totals and will take a little longer to get. If you want to play competitively there is a steam leaderboard, so you can try to achieve the highest score. There's also a statistics page that keeps track of total deaths and other things like total distance traveled.

there are a few minor annoyances that could be fixed with a simple quality of life patch. The menus are slightly annoying to navigate with a controller and there are also some objects like trees and runes that go past the foreground of the screen and are very distracting, and finally the irritatingly bad block placements. These are the only problems I had while playing. Overall Jack B. Nimble is just as basic as a score based infinite runner needs to be, while still being very fun and addictive. Jack B. Nimble is available for $3.00 on Pc/Steam and the App Store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWP6MzXsODk