Spider Jack might be another rope-cutting (or in this case web-cutting) game, but don’t mistake it for a clear Cut The Rope clone. Sure, the two share DNA, but Spider Jack isn’t afraid to mess with a successful formula, and take some chances of its own. Those chances might not always pay off completely, but Spider Jack is pretty compelling none the less.
Getting the similarities out of the way, Spider Jack sees you attempting to get from each level’s starting point back to Spider Jack’s web, where a tasty creature awaits him. Now, Cut The Rope saw you basically bringing food via ropes to a stationary creature. Spider Jack twists this formula by making Spider Jack go get his own dinner.
Lucky for you, Spider Jack is handy with a web. You’ll feel like Spider-Man at times as you swing from grapple point to grapple point in order to pick up the momentum necessary to get the level’s three stars and end up in your web home. This key gameplay reversal is what makes Spider Jack different from Cut The Rope, and in my view, a little more compelling.
Levels are otherwise structured the same, and the games even feel fairly familiar visually, although there is something weird going on with the backgrounds of Spider Jack. They are highly detailed, or at least, quite well drawn, but they move while the level does not.
For instance, if you swing low to the ground, the background will shift, but the actual level, like where the pegs and web are, only move with extreme shifts in direction. It’s disorienting at first, but if you can get used to it, it makes for a neat visual trick.
If you enjoyed Cut The Rope, but would like to see a bit of a different take on it, then Spider Jack is worth checking out. It doesn’t exactly change rope games forever, but at least it approaches them from a different angle.
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