While very different in many aspects, athletes and gamers have one thing in common, and that is enjoying a challenge. Struggling to get further and further inch by inch, just for a shot at victory one day keeps us coming back for more every time. To tap into that “just one more time” feeling of constant struggle is Get Good, and oh boy does it live up to the name with its punishing mix of rocket jumping and precision platforming.

Being popularized in the original Halo games from back in the day, the idea of rocket implies that you use your rocket launcher to point down at your feet to propel yourself to where you want to be, while hopefully surviving the experience. On the other hand, precision platforming has been around since nearly the beginning of video games since many of those older games have very narrow windows of success for making a jump in the first place. This can be explained by the general difficulty of older games being higher, because generally fewer games were sold, so they had to last a long time by making it harder to beat it. Very rarely are both rocket jumping and platforming seen together, and certainly not as the main movement mechanic of an entire game.

With these two concepts in mind, it can be inferred that you are supposed to propel yourself by firing your rocket weapon down in whatever angle you need to accomplish the job. This sounds on paper to be an easy task, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In order to get past the second platform you have to realize that just shooting isn’t enough, but timing a jump just after the rocket is the only way to make any real distance happen in your attempt, which magnifies the variables in calculating your next move by several times. This really comes down to a numbers game, and trial by error. Each time you will understand a little more, and eventually you will learn to predict what might come next, or use what you learned before in a new way for an upcoming platform puzzle. Lots of games operate this way, but this is to another degree with a truly challenging run pretty much right from the beginning and with few and far between checkpoints to help you along the way.

However, where things start to fall apart is the lack of entertainment value. The robot avatar is cool enough, and the novelty of using rocket jumps has an appeal, but the lack of a real soundtrack, the limited animations, and a missing story all cheapen what could be something great. But that isn’t really the point of this kind of game, as with Kaizo Mario and other unbelievably challenging games, it’s all about the challenge and nothing more, and if that’s what your into, then this will be fun for you. But if you rage quit after a few attempts, I can’t think of a worse game to play, so it’s a very niche game. For the speed runners and pro gamers out there though, there are several different modes to help you get better including a ghosting mode that kills you if you touch your previous run ghost, which really amps up the difficulty. This game is lacking of a lot of polish and substance, but what it does do, it does great. This may not be for everyone, but for the people looking for punishment, you’ve come to the right place.