Doodle Jump: HOP The Movie – Review

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By: Lima Sky

Version #: 1.1

Date Released: 2011-04-04

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Price: 0.00

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As part of the extensive marketing plan for the new CGI animated comedy-with-talking-animals, Hop, film distributor Universal Pictures and animation production outfit Illumination Entertainment have partnered with the creators of Doodle Jump for a Hop-themed version of the bestselling iPhone game.

It’s a tie-up that was not wholly unexpected. Simply look at the synonymous verbs in their names and you’d have made the smallest connection between the two cross-media products. The bigger picture, though, concerns Doodle Jump’s popular gameplay, a bit of Hop’s storyline, and both Doodle Jump and Hop’s main characters. The result is a not exactly brand new but perpetually lively iPhone game called Doodle Jump: Hop The Movie.

Doodle Jump: Hop The Movie takes the basic vertical scrolling, jumping game mode of the original Doodle Jump and recasts it with new backgrounds, new objects, and new game characters. Although the Doodler, the little four-legged jumping creature in Doodle Jump, makes an appearance here, the true control character is E.B., the protagonist of Hop. Loosely based on the film’s plot, the story behind Doodle Jump: Hop The Movie involves E.B.’s quest to become the next Easter bunny (hence his initials).

In order to be successful, he must first save Easter from a group of uprising chicks — here they’re the counterparts of the insidious aliens in Doodle Jump — by hopping onto platforms and collecting Easter eggs in the Easter Bunny’s candy factory. The basic rules and controls of the game are carried over here: tilt your device to the left or right to make E.B. hop onto a higher platform while making sure not to bump into an enemy chick, tap to shoot the enemy with a piece of candy, and avoid falling to the bottom lest the game be over.
 
Whereas Doodle Jump has endless gameplay, the Hop movie tie-in is played in levels. There are 25 levels: the first one is readily available while each of the remaining ones is locked until you finish the preceding level. A level is finished as soon as the required number of points is reached, coinciding with the top of the level marked by a victory vessel with a glowing Easter egg on it. Hop onto the trophy on each level and you’ll advance to the next.

The levels are, as expected, progressively difficult, and each new level almost always introduces a change in the objects in the game that will amount to a certain degree of difficulty. For instance, platforms become shorter, become clouds so that they disappear once they’re jumped on, and appear as candies that turn out to be no use to E.B. at all.

The game may bear the name of its source, Doodle Jump, but the graphics of Doodle Jump: Hop The Movie are more faithful to the quality of the movie’s animation (which moviegoers near an AMC theater in the US can see for themselves by purchasing tickets via a click-through icon on the game’s home screen) than that of a doodle. Especially on the iPhone 4’s retina display, the game is not only a fun pick-up-and-play but also pure eye candy.