I keep buying Apple hardware, so I still have Apple Arcade. There are fewer and fewer games that make it worthwhile. But occasionally something like this drops in and I’m like “hey look. I remember that. Lets play it!” and . . it was certainly a game!

Jetpack Joyride was one of the first games I recall playing on my first iPad back in 2011.

As I recall, it was just a competently designed endless runner with some powerups and minimal microtransactions.

Jetpack Joyride 2 is that, but also with incredibly generic progression mechanics. It’s been long enough since I played the original that how the sequel looks is how I remember the original looked 11 years ago. . but there’s no way that’s correct. I don’t want to look up screenshots to ruin the illusion.

In 2011 this was heralded as a masterpiece of the genre, a must-play reason to buy into the iOS ecosystem. In 2022? It . . it exists?

I have two major gripes with it:

It’s Apple Arcade exclusive. I really don’t like that. I would like to pay for this game. I would like to pay for Grindstone. I would like to pay for several Apple Arcade games. But, alas, I am not allowed to.
It’s literally not done. There are four slots for “vehicles”, but there are only 3 of them. The third one says “coming soon!!!”. The progression only has like 50 levels, and beyond that it just goes to “more soon?!?!?” You reach the end of an endless runner and it just has question marks. There doesn’t actually seem to be an actual endless mode. It’s just . . what?

Is this an Apple Arcade Seller? Probably not. If you already have Apple Arcade for some reason, go nuts! You’ve literally already paid for it. Play it or don’t. Enjoy it or don’t. Nothing matters.

2022-08-28 - Addendum⌗

I’ve come back to this a few times since “beating” it, and I can’t stop thinking about how badly they broke this game. They took an endless runner and gave it an end. It looks like there just straight up is no endless mode. That doesn’t make it bad, but it feels . . wrong.