Thanks to Lone Wolf Technology for the review code

Title: Jiffy
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $2.00
Release Date: 01/21/2021

Presentation

Jiffy is a game that uses a very, very basic look, even simpler than the Game Boy! You’re allowed to change the primary color of the game to a few choices of your liking, but once you pick one of your preference, it’s off for rocket-jumping action!

There really isn’t much else to the presentation, as the music is pretty generic FM-sounding background tracks, with nothing that I found memorable during the game.

Gameplay

Jiffy is a minimalistic platformer with only the D-Pad and one button needed to play. This button lets you jump once, and then in mid-air, pressing the button again will cause you to shoot from your feet for a short amount of time, which can be used as a hover to get over pits, and to shoot at enemies underneath you.

So the main objective in turn, is to use your hover feet to fly to the end of each stage, using your limited number of hit points to survive to the end. Due to the simplistic controls, these levels can fly by quickly, but you’ll still have to deal with an increasing array of enemies and hazards thrown your way as the game opens up little by little. Soon you’ll be breaking blocks and bouncing off multiple enemies in a row to refill your shot gauge.

That being said, the 44 levels aren’t all Jiffy has on offer: besides the fact that several of those levels are simple boss fights (simply shoot the bosses’ heads until they die, while avoiding damage yourself), there are two score-chasing modes to offer some light replay value, with one of them being an endless mode where a randomly generated stage continues endlessly until you die, and the other being a battle mode where you have to defeat an endless amount of enemies in a closed area before meeting that same fate. Still, these two modes don’t really have much variety, with the endless being the only one I felt compelled to try more than one.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Jiffy is as basic of a platformer as they come, and the tight controls do lead to a fun, playable experience. That being said, once you beat the 44 stages you won’t have much of a reason to go back, and only one of the two bonus modes is really worth your time.

Even for $2, it’s a pretty tough sell, and with other, longer simplistic platformers out on the market with way more replay value, I can’t really say this game has any sort of edge or drawback that makes it better or worse in that regard. Jiffy is, just yet another platformer, for better or worse, but an interesting short romp worth checking out if you’re looking for a new game to add to your backlog.

I give Jiffy a 5 out of 10,