Jackass: The Game review

Sept 25, 2007

An ambulance has just arrived and its lights are flashing. The Ex-Jackass director lies sprawled on the cement and the camera has been dropped. It looks bad but quickly gets worse as you learn that he's "sprained his vagina." How will the boys film their new season without a guy to hold the camera? Will they find a new professional director? Use a tripod? Become an animated series? No, it's up to you - the guy who happened to be standing there when the accident happened - to become the new director of the Jackass TV series. As your silent avatar heroically picks up the camera, Knoxville gives you your mission: "Shoot some funny stuff and don't sprain your vagina." Of course, none of that matters, and from that point on you control the cast directly - no cinematography involved - but the game's brand of hit-in-the-balls humor has been established.

Hey, cool, now you're a Jackass too! It almost works. The personality of the cast, the pump-up, volume-up rock/metal soundtrack and our fondness of the series make us want to want to play. The problem is that the mini-games just don't cut the biscuits because they're repetitive and shallow. And when we say mini-games we mean the whole game - it's all mini-games. They're hyperbolized versions of things from the show, and they involve injuries that only cartoons could survive.

You play through five games at a time until your total score is high enough to unlock the next "episode" and five new games. To name a few, there are elephant poo dives, suburban catapults, extreme juggling and a game called Snow Balls, which is loosely based on Katamari.

Before each event characters from the show introduce themselves and the event in the "Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Demolition Golf" style of the show. And then you use a golf club to launch grenades at a house, or whatever. Again, it's funny if you're a fan, but like the rest of the games, hitting grenades with a golf club can be mastered in a few minutes, and destroying the house produces the same lackluster effect each time.