Jazzpunk (PC) – your boss has his office in a tube car, for some reason

Video game comedies are a rare breed but is this indie take on spoofs such as Airplane and Top Secret really a laughing matter?

According to the old actor’s maxim ‘Dying is easy. Comedy is hard’. That goes a hundredfold for video games where dying (and killing) is a triviality but comedy is so hard to pull off that most games are sensible enough never to try. It is of course difficult to get comic timing right when you’re shooting a zombie’s face off, and so Jazzpunk devotes almost all its efforts to trying to make you laugh. And with predictably uneven results.



There might not be many other video game comedies to compare it with, but Jazzpunk’s non-interactive influences are fairly easy to spot. There’s a clear love here for the work of Mel Brooks, and Zucker and Abrahams parodies such as Airplane and Top Secret. The output of publisher Adult Swim is another obvious influence in terms of the more surreal non sequiturs.

Although with the array of cringeworthy puns and visual gags – from a busker that boasts of having lots of gigs (‘Almost a terabyte’) to using a photocopy of your rear end on a security card and being identified as ‘Mr Butts’ – it’s only their lesser work that Jazzpunk ever seems comparable with.


The game itself is a sort of first person adventure game, starting in an alternative 1950s version of Tokyo, where you’re tasked with a range of seemingly mundane Cold War style spying jobs – from tailing suspects to knocking off enemy agents. You can get to the job at hand straight away if you want, but that’d be missing out on a swathe of bizarre side quests along the way.

Although every side quest is different the nature of the gags and associated mini-games is restricted to a pretty narrow window. And although at first the number of retro gaming references are genuinely funny (an early encounter helping a frog hack a coffee shop’s wi-fi leads to an impromptu game of Frogger) the attempts to shoe horn in ever more retro classics becomes increasingly tiresome.

Another problem is that almost everything is just a set-up for one or two good gags and that’s it. Even the main story quests are short and simplistic, and although this is clearly an attempt to mimic the quickfire insanity of the game’s cinematic influences it just comes across as shallow and unnecessarily limiting as a video game.

Jazzpunk (PC) – a typically un-hilarious one-liner

Interactivity and complex puzzles are not a primary part of Jazzpunk’s appeal, but a lot of the time what you’re doing doesn’t really amount to much more than walking up to an interactive hot spot, listening to a joke, and moving on. There are some more action style elements though, such as using a fly swatter to take on a plague of spiders and annoy other characters with, but the dalliances with first person shooter action will have you quickly pinning for fart jokes and bad puns.



There’s also the fact that the visuals are well… we don’t like to criticise an indie game in this way but let’s just say they’re budgetarily-challenged. In many indie games that wouldn’t necessarily matter but the almost non-existent animation and odd character designs, where everyone looks like they’re either a corporate mascot or they’ve just jumped off a road sign warning, is distractingly cheap-looking.

The sound effects and voiceovers are even worse, with the former being almost entirely public domain and the latter subject to a robotic filter purely, it seems to us, to hide how bad they are. Still, at least the soundtrack is good.

And yet, Jazzpunk is so unusual and so obviously enamoured of its own silliness that you can’t help but admire it on some level. It’s biggest fault is perhaps simply that it recalls fellow indie games such as Gone Home and The Stanely Parable, both of which are inarguably better games – and in the case of The Stanely Parable more consistently amusing.

As a video game then Jazzpunk really isn’t up to much, but comedy is in the eye of the beholder and all we can tell you is that as far as we’re concerned the number of jokes hitting their target were greatly outnumbered by the misses. Given the gag reel is on autofire for most of the game though there’s a very good chance you’ll find plenty to laugh at. Or at least chuckle, and even that’s a welcome change for most video games.


In Short: Not quite Scary Movie but certainly not the video game equivalent of Airplane, although the fact that it even tries to be is almost recommendation enough.

Pros: Even the most misreable of gamers will find a few good gags to laugh at, and quickfire delivery means you never have to dwell on the bad ones for long. Great music.

Cons: Even fans will admit the hit-to-miss ratio of the jokes is very low. Very little in the way of gameplay. Retro mini-games get increasingly tiresome. Ultra cheap visuals and audio.

Score: 5/10

Formats: PC

Price: £11.99

Publisher: Adult Swim Games

Developer: Necrophone Games

Release Date: 7th February 2014

Age Rating: N/A

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