Jackal is punctuated by monologues from a protagonist who appears perpetually in over his head – always biting off a bit more than he can chew and talking a bigger game than he can play. The game itself, like its protagonist, comes out of the gate with a lot of confidence and bravado but not quite the mettle to back it all up. The tragic distinction being that in-game our hero ends up making it out alive, where the game itself feels more like a fumbled attempt ending in bullet holes.

The story and its presentation, for example, is certainly a spirited swing but it’s not exactly a home run. A nameless main character wittily narrates his self-medicated journey through Las Vegas’ seedier side accompanied by his hallucinated companion, the Egyptian god of death. Every second line features some attempt at a dry, film noir-ish one-liner about drugs, women, or some other similarly pulpy subject matter. None of this dry monologue hits the mark of coming off as cool or witty, and the extent to which it misses sometimes feels like the game is parodying this style of writing. Outside of a few examples, none of this was so bad that I had to resist the urge to skip cutscenes, but it did unfortunately fail to entertain in the ways it seemed so intent on doing. The handling of the drugs (the use of which is the protagonist’s main piece of characterisation) can be particularly tedious, as if listing off drugs is itself entertaining to behold. These moments end up coming off less like the regular thoughts of a messy veteran of narcotics and more like a schoolboy bragging about how his dad lets him have sips of his beers. Because hallucinations are mandatory when these kinds of stories involve drugs, our medicated hero’s primary companion is the Egyptian god of death who only he can see. Anubis ends up being the game’s bright spot, adding just a little (effective) humour to the dynamic. Most of his dialogue is terribly cliché but a lot of it is just rightly so that it works. Anubis is the stick-in-the-mud straight-man to our protagonist’s loose canon renegade. Even though fantastical hallucinations in stories about drugs can be tiresome if done poorly, it’s probably the part of the game’s writing that I found the least tiresome. 
In motion the game is clearly copying Hotline Miami’s homework. Enemies move fast and your character dies in one hit. You move through levels dispatching nasty fellers with your fists, various melee weapons and a small selection of guns, usually rapidly switching based on what’s within reach and who you need to batter. The difference being that Hotline Miami allowed you to see what you were walking into – the layout of the level and the enemies within – where Jackal most often puts you in a room and sends in enemies from all sides. A further departure is that levels aren’t handcrafted but are rather procedurally generated. The result is that action is a frantic brawl which I often didn’t feel required skill so much as feverishly clicking on bad guys until they’re dead. This is all exacerbated by the fact that the gameplay just doesn’t feel as tight as it ought to in order to sustain such quick and brutal fights. On multiple occasions I’d swing or shoot directly at an enemy and the bullet or smacking implement would just do nothing, resulting in a swift game over for me. Unavoidable deaths like this, or enemy attacks after the supposed end of a level, always cheapen a game whose design emphasises difficulty. Being able to draw the Hotline comparison isn’t in itself a dealbreaker by any means, but it does make it very easy for this game to suffer from comparison: everything this game gets wrong Hotline got right. 

Concerning the visual presentation through which it’s all presented, the colours are nice but the cell-shaded art style isn’t anything to write home about. Environments – specifically as they become covered in blood – have a cool, Tarantino feeling to them the more outrageous the red splatters get, but here again I’m reminded of Hotline Miami. Cutscenes emphasise the low poly models and ditch the cell-shading – with a hazy filter over the top – which looks a lot nicer and feels a lot fresher than the look of the gameplay sections. Music, while rarely excellent, is on the whole quite competently done. Frantic jazz drumming is a constant under varying arrangements of psychedelic electric guitars, pianos, or even the occasional synth line. 

Ultimately, no part of Jackal’s brisk story (took me no less than three hours to finish but I’ve seen others have lower numbers) was especially entertaining. The unfortunate thing is that no part was especially bad either, save for some cringeworthy dialogue – which is a sin very many games are guilty of. The trouble is, as ambitious as it is, it never gets close enough to the lofty aspirations of its art style, story and gameplay that any one of these elements felt worthwhile. The end product is a game that is unfortunately hard to recommend. 4/10