‘Jazzpunk: Director’s Cut’ Adds the Food Fight Arena Shooter We Always Wanted

Employed to resolve spats within Laurel and Hardy, Blazing Saddles, The Great Race, and countless TV sitcoms, pie fights are the pinnacle of slapstick comedy. And yet there has not been many opportunities for video games to let players get messy with confectioneries. Of course it would be Jazzpunk, one of the funniest games ever made, originally released in 2014, to return with a Quake-style shooter to slather wedding cake all over deathmatch arenas.

Originally an easter egg hidden in its tropical resort level, “Wedding Qake” was a goofy meta-game where a wedding had devolved into a messy free for all. Players could use weapons like a cake mini-gun or a one-hit kill champagne cork, and the first to ten earns their right to true love. In the original Jazzpunk this was one-player, and you only competed against bots. In the brand new PlayStation 4 game Jazzpunk: Director’s Cut, you can play against four friends in a GoldenEye-style split screen version of Qake, with added maps and weapons from the rest of the game, such as poison spitting fugu fish and a jar full of spiders.

For those who had not played Jazzpunk previously, and shame on you, the game is a colourful slapstick story of spycraft and espionage, brimmed with visual gags and nonsense highly inspired by films like Naked Gun, Hot Shots!, and let’s say, I don’t know, National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1. Each level is like an onion of jokes, warranting a few play throughs to catch a glimpse of all the goofs. Instead of crying, this onion will make you laugh, which is much better! Travelling around the world to plunder classified documents, Jazzpunk sees you photocopying your ass, eating underwear and spraying pigeon musk on unsuspecting bystanders with the utmost discretion.

With the addition of multiplayer Wedding Qake, you can make love AND war with friends in a round of cake throwing that is more brutal than a fifth of the tapes submitted to America’s Funniest Home Videos, and just a little less brutal than that wind down finale from Wild Tales.