Jack Lumber Review

What’s a lumberjack to do when a tree kills his granny? That’s right, deforestation in an effort to locate the dastardly pine responsible! That’s the plot of Jack Lumber, a puzzle game which sees you chopping wood as it flies into the air to get points.

It was released in 2013 on PC after a mobile release a year prior, but is currently only available on PC. Why am I reviewing it 13 years later? Because it’s in my backlog and we don’t have a review for it.

The gameplay is familiar if you’ve ever played Fruit Ninja, but logs can only be cut along the grain; cutting in the wrong direction will lose you points. Also, it has to be done all in one line, in a time limit, with the wood spinning at different rates.

You’ll soon come across timber which can only be hit in one direction, as well as longer ones which need you to cut in a curve. Eventually, there are exploding barrels — which are a good thing, as they successfully deal with any wood in range.

The final cut of each level includes a woodland creature, and putting a line near them is an immediate fail. If you’ve had a perfect cut rate until the end and mess up by trying to hack an eagle’s leg off, it can put a damper on things. Jack will forgive missing wood, but don’t you dare think about touching a moose. Unless you’re in his cabin where he collects them all, then poking them is fine.

You need to maximise your points so that you can afford to buy syrups that have different effects. One gives you another go if you mess up with a cut, which can prove frustrating if you have multiple syrups and keep messing up the same movement, forcing you to retry over and over, wasting syrups… There are also beards and hats to buy: the first changes how difficult the game is, the second is just for decorating your forest friends.

As this began life as a mobile game, it’s not the prettiest game to look at on a big monitor. Everything is upscaled from an image that was far too small for purpose. But it’s unavailable on mobile platforms, so I can’t even confirm if it looked better there.

Despite how frantic some levels can feel, I never felt overwhelmed by Jack Lumber’s difficulty curve. You don’t have to get a certain number of points to qualify for the next level, for one thing. It’s a fun little game that will take you a couple of hours to finish, but longer to get the high scores.