Job The Leprechaun Review

Job the Leprechaun looks like a Mario game, but it certainly lacks what it takes to make it a decent game. The game looks good enough, but the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.

The story is about a witch, that has kidnapped his friend called Eri. It’s your mission to save her- I think we have heard this before! There are various stages, enemies, and obstacles that you must overcome in this retro-styled platformer. I’m a huge fan of platforming games like Mario, that have quality gameplay mechanics and responsive controls. Unfortunately Job the Leprechauns controls, in my opinion, are particularly awful.

The designs of stages are very basic and feel baron. The aim in each area is to collect clovers to activate a door, that sends you to the next area. You face enemies during stages that include things like, zombies, goblins, knights and other creatures. You can attack them with your hat, yes that’s right, your hat. You have 5 lives and three continues, and you need these as you can easily be killed with one hit.

During stages you can find random power-ups that try to keep gameplay interesting, but overall it’s a fairly shallow experience. You also get assistance from some of your buddies, like an elf, who can shoot enemies. As I said before the controls are awful. Platforming games are all about having slick, accurate control of your character so you can execute that perfectly times jump or attack. Job the Leprechauns controls feel clumsy and delayed. I would describe the movement of the character as ‘slippery.’ This movement also causes issues with ladders, as he tends to slip through them to either side instead of climbing up. Also the analog stick on the Wii U simply doesn’t work. You have to use the D-Pad, which is fine, but its little things like this that add up to make an experience that’s simply frustrating.

The Gamepad is pretty much useless, with no touch screen and no sound output. Controlling Job is extremely frustrating. The character feels very hard to control and killing enemies is pretty hard. A few weapons have been added to make things easier. There are flowers that can be struck to launch bullets at enemies, bowling balls to roll at them, and pots of gold hidden in trees that can make him invincible.

There’s a boss level halfway through and a bonus stage lets you bounce and leap over enemies. This is an automatically side-scrolling stage, that sees you collecting clovers. The game is also pretty buggy, with stages not loading and my game just stopped completely a couple of times. The style of the game is very simple. The characters are bland and the worlds feel fairly empty. Compared to a game like Super Mario, it looks pretty bad. The colour palette is vibrant but there’s just nothing interesting to explore in the world.

Overall, it’s a disappointing game. It’s a platformer with simple world and character design. The controls are awful, and it’s a challenge getting to grips with physically being able to move your character successfully through each stage. There’s no real replayabilty to the game once you have finished. It would have been nice to have seen a bit more depth to the characters or the world in which Job exists. Playing the game felt a bit of a chore, and maybe that’s why the character is aptly named Job.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo Switch code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.