Game Review: Circus Jump (Mobile – Free to Play)

Circus Jump is a colourful & zany endless jumper where your character automatically bounces through a circus environment. Tap the screen to dive through fiery rings & collect balloons that increase your multiplier all while picking up coins & dodging thrown pies.

This review is for version 1.0.

The aim is to set a high score by making it as far as possible while picking up coins to spend in the store. That’s it for gameplay as you would expect. To add some much-needed longevity you can unlock a few different characters (or skins as they are referred to here). These are bought using balloon animals which can be earned in-game & with real money purchases.

25 gold coins transfer into 1 balloon animal. Though a decent run can see you earn a fairly substantial amount of coins. That being said there are only 4 characters available including the default one which is a surprisingly small amount. Not that that it really matters as the differences are cosmetic only.

Powerups also cost balloon animals with there being two available. Fire extinguishers are used to stop your character burning when you hit the edge of a fiery ring. A necessity if you want to really rack up a high score. Once your character is burning you have a short amount of time to put them out before it’s game over. You can of course watch an ad or spend 5 balloon animals to continue that run. However, it won’t be long before you hit another fiery ring.

The other powerup are magnets & they are used to draw coins to you for a short amount of time. The extinguishers cost 5 balloon animals while the magnets cost 10 so you’ll need to get coin collecting to store up a significant amount of either. Of course, you can always spend some real money if you want with 25 balloon animals costing $0.99 before going up to $3.99 for 1000. Amazingly that is the highest in-app purchase within Circus Jump.

Is it value for money? Not really as once you’ve bought the remaining characters you’ll just be spending hundreds of balloon animals on powerups. Also once you’ve set a super high score, you’re not likely to return as your purchase is finite.

There are positives in Circus Jump. It’s nice looking, the controls are simple to use, the gameplay is easy to understand & the idea is a little different. The in-app purchases are hardly reasonable based on how little replay value there is. However, these aren’t even remotely close to the worse we’ve seen in the free to play market.

A bit more refinement & this could be seen as one of the better endless games in the market.