Jackass: The Game: Bone-Breaking Mayham Company: Red Mile Entertainment Jackass: The Game looks like it will be a game that really takes after the show. The basic premise is that your character approaches the Jackass crew and attempts to join the show. You start off as a lowly intern having to fetch random objects and testing new stunts, but as you progress through the game's eight areas, you will be asked to do even wilder and crazier antics. The basic design of the game will be several open-world environments that range from a suburban neighborhood to a farm. Throughout these locations, you will find various vehicles (red wagons, soap box cars, Segues, etc.) and launchers. You can either have fun in a playground type manner just trying out the various devices and attempting to get the most points in a stunt in order to level up various attributes for your character, or you can seek out the members of the show and find out what the next stunt they want you to do is. A stunt starts off by either jumping into a launcher (trampolines, garbage trucks, giant slingshots, etc.) or a vehicle and lasts until the next time you touch the ground. If you drive into a launcher or fall onto a vehicle, the trick continues and your score keeps going up. For instance, if you hop on a wagon and instead of just throwing yourself off of it, you ride up to a trampoline, then you can use that launcher to throw yourself into the air in order to keep earning points. From there, you can try to land on another launcher or a vehicle in order to keep things going. Your trick score isn't just based on the number of times you can change between launchers and vehicles; while on a vehicle, you can perform various stunts and as long as you keep your balance, your score will increase. When you are ready to end the stunt, your launch yourself from the vehicle (or launcher) and go flying through the air. Similar to performing stunts on a vehicle, you can strike various poses while in the air to increase a meter that will determine how many bones you will break when you hit the ground. The more bones you break, the bigger the score multiplier you will get when you hit. I mentioned earlier that you will be trying to increase various attributes in Jackass: The Game, these are things like balance (for performing stunts on vehicles), bone breaker (how quickly you can fill the meter), skill (how well you pull off tricks) and agility. This adds a bit of an RPG feel to the game and the more you try to increase these attributes, the easier it will be to earn the points necessary to complete the various tasks given to you by Johnny Knoxville, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Steve-O and the rest of the Jackass crew. There will also be a mini-game mode that lets you do everything from throwing snowballs at people walking down the street, to playing dodgeball. In the snowball game, you drag snowballs onto your slingshot and pull it back and launch it onto the top screen. Hitting pedestrians grants you points, hitting them with yellow snowballs grants you multipliers. The dodgeball game is interesting because when your character grabs a ball, you have to draw a line in the way you want to throw it. You can bounce it off of walls or put a curve on it based on the way you strike your stylus. There are quite a few rough edges in the version of Jackass: The Game that I got to play. The graphics need a bit of smoothing out, the text doesn't always display correctly and other details like that, but all the mechanics are in place and the feel of the game probably won't change much by release. If you've loved the Jackass show and movies and want to see the people from them in a game, then you might want to keep an eye on Jackass: The Game, but it's pretty obvious this game is designed to be a niche title. Expect to see Jackass: The Game hit the shelves early January with an ESRB rating of Teen. -J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer Related Links: Jackass TV Series Official Home Page Jackass: The Game Official Home Page