Bounce Rescue! review for PS4, Xbox One

Bounce Rescue! might just be the most generic game I’ve ever played in my life. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just…is.

I mean, what else is there to say about a platformer where the main characters are interchangeable blobs on a mission to rescue more interchangeable blobs? The graphics are blandly colorful. The gameplay is straight out of Platforming 101. If Bounce Rescue does a single thing that innumerable other games haven’t already done — both significantly better and significantly worse — I’d be astonished. It’s just that meh.

If I really, really pushed myself, I could think of a few things I dislike about it, I guess. Like, why are the two main character blobs gendered, with a blue boy blob and a pink girl blob? Considering there’s zero difference between them apart from their colors, and their respective genders have no bearing whatsoever on how they play, it seems kind of weird to even have the two options.

I have some minor issues with Bounce Rescue on the gameplay side, too. For example, the fact that there’s not much of a checkpoint system at work here: you can either play the game on Easy and get an infinite amount of lives to play each level, or you can go for trophies on Normal and have to start each level from the beginning every time you die. It makes the game get a little bit frustrating pretty quickly, and it doesn’t help that every so often on Normal, for no discernible reason, you’re rescued by a little bubble and you can float yourself to safety. There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to it, but it’s here, and it’s enough to leave you feeling baffled.

Okay, maybe not baffled, since that signifies a bit of a strong feeling, and there’s no way I care enough about Bounce Rescue! to wonder why it does what it does. Like I said, it just is, and it exists to be a generic platformer, and there’s no reason why you should care about it one way or another.