An epic quest for freedom, happiness, and bananas. This is just a short sum of Disco Pixel’s first upcoming mobile game Jungle Rumble. Disco Pixel is the creation of Trevor Stricker, a video game industry veteran who decided to use his talent to create fun, one of a kind games. Jungle Rumble is still in development and will be released in October, but I was able to have the chance to play a demo of the game before its official release.
The synopsis of the game is as follow. You are a spirit that helps monkeys in the Mofongo tribe and one day the monkeys find that another tribe has arrived in their jungle. The Mofongo tribe relies on the bananas the jungle provides to survive and the other tribe eats those same bananas. Because their carrying capacity will be reduced due to the threat of this new interspecific competition, the Mofongo tribe engages in war against the newcomers for the sake of survival. Your job is to help them beat the enemy tribe.
I love Jungle Rumble because it’s the first game that’s required me to strategize my next move while maintaining focus on my actions in a long time, making it a very intellectually satisfying game. This comes from how the game is played. Jungle Rumble is a rhythm based game that has you match your screen taps to the beat of the background music to move monkeys from one branch to another and have them throw coconuts at the enemy. Once you reach a certain point in the game, you will be able to move multiple monkeys as one unit and have all of them throw coconuts together to knock out enemy packs or move around the tree knocking out every monkey one by one without having to come back to the specific branch with coconuts to collect more. This ability however presents a challenge, to maintain the pack together you have to maintain the beat of the background music without stopping and time your transitions right so the enemy doesn’t go to your branch and knock out your allies or throw coconuts at an empty branch and lose the unit. As the game progresses the beat become tiny bit by tiny bit faster and the layout of every level presents a new challenge.
Combine this unique gameplay with the stellar, colorful graphics seen and you’ve got the mobile game serious gamers have been waiting for. I am looking forward to the game’s release and with this preview of what’s to come, I wonder about what the studio will do to improve upon the game and what later stages may look like. All in all, I think Disco Pixel has the next big hit in mobile gaming.