John Christian Review

6 minutes of reading / By /

John Christian is a 3D Action Platformer that finds a young man becoming a warrior of God after praying for his brother’s soul. It turns out that his brother is in hell for being a dirty sinner, and God sets John on a quest through the seven layers to save souls. Or maybe the game meant brother in the Christian figurative way. I had and continue to have no bloody clue what I just played through. If you are here for a heartfelt story or the Christian bible’s teachings, this title barely has either. However, it did have a surprisingly long playtime and succeeded in its mission to get one closer to God. Lord knows I was praying for the pain to end after around thirty minutes of John’s nonsense.

So sass filled intro aside, I must commend how long John can sprint. With the unnecessarily large environments you must traverse, they could have easily doubled this title’s playtime and driven me to alcoholism. There is little in the way of gameplay starting off. You merely go from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ in the style of the Walking Sim genre. Scattered throughout are floating bibles which serve as a checkpoint and offer up a bible quote. You’d think they would have plenty to work with, but nope. Quotes will soon begin to repeat with no consideration for the surrounding. Taking into mind that most levels are themed on a sin, it actually would have been cool if the quotes pertained to them. Instead, we get “No man cometh onto the father, but by me” for the 69th time.

You know, I’m starting to feel really dirty with this review, and I cover hentai games. I sincerely have no idea if the dev was trolling while making this game. I sure had a chuckle, though, at least while I wasn’t bogged down by the monotony of the gameplay and everything surrounding it. Around the time it took you to read this, you would have finally reached your first interaction aside from holding down the W key and wondering if you have a spare rope in the shed. You will be asked to pray, and God delivers by making a set of spectral stairs to get past your obstacle. This could have been a compelling feature. It is unfortunately wasted as it’s only used a few times throughout and is regulated to simply unlocking the cages of the souls you’re meant to free. Seeking guidance from God would have fit perfectly here and allowed for some TimeShift-style scenarios. As is, you can pray all you want, but John is still going straight into molten lava if you miss a jump.

This brings me to the platforming. It was an enormous mistake requiring accuracy with these controls. You have no mid-air control over John. As soon as you press the jump button, it is already decided whether you will make it or not. To further muddy things, you soon receive a set of armor that allows you to sprint at incredible speeds and double jump. It is sort of fun to jump around like the Hulk while traversing the level, yet as soon as you need some accuracy, that enjoyment ceases. That lack of air control makes sprinting a death sentence, as you will likely massively overshoot your target. Having a double jump should surely help with that, right? Well, it should. The problem here is that the controls are extremely unreliable and prone to randomly ignoring inputs. At times you’ll simply slide right off a platform as your character refuses to jump. On other occasions, you can find yourself triple jumping, which I’m not even sure is intended, or that I merely assumed John can only double jump. The controls are that finicky.

Believe it or not, the platforming is probably the best part of the game. I sure enjoyed it over going through similar-looking swathes of empty environments or navigating in pitch darkness as in later levels. What is easily the worst aspect of this title has to be the combat. It is shocking how they got a one-button affair so, so wrong. You’d think it’d be obvious when you slashed someone with a broadsword, yet here it takes a more MMO approach. You’ll be whiffing at thin air, wondering if you’re even connecting with the enemy until it suddenly lays down and dies. Rinse and repeat for a couple hundred times in this two-and-a-half-hour journey. There is also a special ability that one-shots most enemies near you. It is governed by the Unction meter and only refills by picking up one of the scattered red potions. Unction is also refilled by dying. Considering the level doesn’t reset when using a checkpoint, you can easily cheese everything via this method.

A silver lining of the combat is that you don’t even have to participate in it. You are never locked in and can simply run past everything. I consider it as turning the other cheek and being a pacifist rather than being a half-assed reviewer. The only thing you have to kill is the boss of a level. You then Pray to free the damned soul of that stage and proceed to join John in that praying, hoping to God that friggin exit teleporter works. If not, the only solution I found is to leave the game, hope it doesn’t set you too far back, and then fantasize about the teleporter working this time. I got a double whammy once when John couldn’t pull out his sword. That isn’t an uncommon occurrence, but this time I was at the end of the level and couldn’t slay the boss. One suicide and sprint back later, you guessed it, the teleporter didn’t work after all that. This game is about as stable as I was after some troll friend suddenly gifted me ‘John Christian 2’ soon after finishing this one.

Technical aspects aside, this game is simply boring. It quickly tosses what few good ideas it has, like praying being capable of warping a level, or a section where you need to answer a multiple-choice bible question. In its stead, we get giant, mostly empty landscapes littered with enemies and the occasional platforming. It tells no story or teaches any lesson either. John Christian does nothing to keep the player engaged. To its credit, it does have rare moments of fascinating scenery/symbolism. One such case was in the Lust layer with a twerking skeleton. Another occurred during the Gluttony stage as you platformed off of junk food. There was potential there in that ocean of drabness. When all is said and done, yesterday I suffered, and today I had a blast writing about it. As Jesus said, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”. Amen, and no, I’m not playing John Christian 2 ;_;

Rating:
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