No one has ever made a game where you play a caveman before. Wait. That’s not right. Wasn’t there a game called Bonk’s Adventure? And hang on a second, wasn’t there a caveman platformer called Joe & Mac? Didn’t it have a sequel? Ack! What about Caveman Games, the caveman sports game? Or Farcry Primal? Ok, fine. There are a few games where you play cavemen. In fact, cavemen have fascinated modern humans for as long as we’ve been able to conceive of them. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about cavemen living in the center of the earth in his 1914 book ‘At The Earth’s Core’ over a hundred years ago. And today we’re still putting cavemen in media.
Jet Kave Adventure from Polish developer 7Levels features a caveman creatively named Kave. He’s been ousted from his village, and wandering about, he runs into a crashed alien spacecraft. Being a caveman, he has no idea what’s happening and the alien zaps him, knocking him unconscious and flying off in search of raw materials to fix its ship. Kave wakes up and while exploring the wreckage, finds an advanced jetpack which teleports itself onto his back. Suddenly we’re off!
Kave’s goal is to stop the invaders from setting off a huge volcanic eruption while gathering raw materials. Unfortunately, they’ve flown quite far away and the only way to get there is to use his newfound flying abilities to navigate a series of side scrolling 2.5D linear levels in an attempt to stop the alien menace. Everything is carefully rendered in 3D with a variety of enemy designs, weapons, and moves available to the intrepid Kave. You’ll soar over chasms, fight vicious prehistoric plants and animals, and generally hope not to get whomped by the random bosses that populate Kave’s world.
Initially, everything seems great in Jet Kave Adventures. It’s visually pleasing, controls well, and levels seem to be fairly creative. Suddenly you’re getting chased through caves by a rampaging mammoth. Then you’re fighting assorted tribesmen. The whole thing has a feel similar to a more two-dimensional Crash Bandicoot or Pandemonium!.
But after a while, something shifts in the game. By the time you get about halfway through the first area in the game (consisting of a whopping 9 levels), things have already gotten fairly stale. Backgrounds are recycled over and over. You’ve been chased by a mammoth several times, done the same sort of jumping and climbing puzzles over and over again, and generally reached the limits of what’s interesting about the game already. Sure, you can upgrade your weapons, jet pack, and other items (though how cavemen can upgrade jetpacks is entirely beyond me) but it isn’t even necessary to finish the first world of the game. The conventions that Jet Kave Adventure uses have already worn thin and the difficulty is just high enough to be irritating without being outrageous.
Reaching each new area provides a minimalist cinema sequence which almost belittles the amount of effort some areas take to finish, and spending that much time platforming means that it’s easy to lose track of the story and therefore any investment in the game as well. You can grab some fancy golden idols if you’re a wild completist, but why bother? The whole thing feels like a stale, dated version of Rocket Knight Adventures (the original Genesis version) with some modern skins on it and a few more complex mechanics tossed in.
Jet Kave looks pretty good overall, even if the character designs are somewhat generic in their cartoonish style and the backgrounds start to repeat fairly rapidly. The game itself moves smoothly, there are no video hitches on the Xbox Series X, and the whole thing feels polished if not a bit sophomoric. It definitely would have been nice to have a bit more flair here, but that’s not a criticism per say, more of a preference, as the game is perfectly serviceable as it stands.
The sound on the other hand takes a bit more getting used to. The background music has the thumping flavor of the first Crash Bandicoot as well, but in a style all its own. Sound effects are solid and easy to differentiate and the sound levels are well mixed. There’s just one little thing and once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. Every time Kave does anything at all, he grunts monosyllabically. Jump, grunt. Land, grunt. Swing your club, grunt. Fly, grunt. Once you notice it, there’s no end to the constant utterances from your clever cave-friend, and it get old. Fast. This is definitely a mistake on the part of the sound designer and honestly, it would be an immeasurable improvement to remove it with an update.
Upgrades for your weapon, jet pack, and other items cost you seeds which you collect in levels. They’re everywhere too. Floating in the air, hidden in breakable walls, under the leaves of plants. It seems like there’s no end to the number of seed hiding places in Jet Kave Adventure. Scrounge up enough and you can add to your life bar, increase your supply of rocks, and even add fuel to your jetpack for a range boost. It’s a decent upgrade system, but it still feels kind of tacked on, rather than each upgrade organically leading to the next stage. Often, you won’t earn enough seeds to buy an upgrade in a given level, especially some of the later ones that require significantly more seeds to purchase. Eventually, even upgrading becomes a slow grind through difficult repetitive levels though.
At $15, Jet Kave Adventure isn’t a particularly expensive game, but it’s also not one that draws the player in. It’s a perfectly average platformer that drags on a bit over 36 levels and will last you somewhere around 5-7 hours if you’re at least decent at these sorts of action titles. But it’s nothing special either and the story certainly won’t keep you enthralled, so unless you’re absolutely dying for a platform game with cavemen it might be a better idea to wait for a sale on this one. You won’t regret playing Jet Kave Adventure as it’s quite solid, but it won’t be the platform experience that defines our age either.
This review is based on a digital copy of Jet Kave Adventure provided by the publisher. It was played with an Xbox Series X using a 55” 1080p Sony HDTV. Jet Kave Adventure is also available for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, and PC on Steam. Hey, wait a minute! Why do cavemen always wear cheetah skins anyway? Are there that many cheetahs wandering about to get skinned? Can’t they wear anything else? It definitely seems odd.