‘Splosion Man

By: Xander

On: July 24th, 2009

Independent Developer Twisted Pixel’s previous effort Maw was a fun if flawed experience. Undeniably charming it lacked any real amount of depth to keep you playing after the credits rolled.
Their new game Splosion Man just hit the XBLA this week for 800 Makeshift points and, given the amount of people involved in the production according to the credits might possibly be the last one I could get away with calling ‘indie’. However at the very least I wanted to see how their follow up to Maw fared, and it must be said it’s pretty damn fun.

Strangely, while Maw didn’t have much of a story there doesn’t seem to be any story to ‘Splosion Man whatsoever. I think he must be some kind of escaped experiment, but nothing is literally described to the player, so lets just say you play a man made of explosions ’because videogames’. So now the story is out of the way we can talk about the game itself. It’s pretty much a standard platform/action/puzzle game where dexterity is generally more important than lateral thinking. There’s about 50 stages in the game, each about 5 minutes in length and the entire campaign can be run through in about 4-5 hours.

You only have one button that really does anything beyond the movement commands which is ‘Splode’, causing your character to rocket jump and blow up anything around him. This can be used as you would expect for regular jumping and wall jumping, but also means you can blow up different forms of explosive barrel to give yourself a much more powerful leap. It’s a simple mechanic which only really gets more complex by increasing the number of successive jumps between safe ground or checkpoints. Sometimes however you will have to press a button to cause a barrel to appear for a limited time as it fires out a depositor, in which case you’ll have to time a jump accurately in order to explode the barrel at the right time to push you in the right direction.

The game only gets more complicated from there, and that’s where the first act of the game really shines. Each level manages to introduce new and imaginative concepts to work around, with either crushing ceiling spikes or rising cryogenic goop requiring quick thinking and fast action in order to avoid. The problem here is that for the most part this is impossible. At least on the first try. Trial and error is certainly the method you’ll be using to be able to pass through each stage of the game. Again it isn’t so bad in the initial act, but in the two successive ones they stop adding in new elements to the game meaning you’re just introduced to some insane construction of earlier puzzle pieces. Which will cause you to die. Repeatedly. If you’re a fan of ‘Nikujin’ or ‘IWBTG’ this probably wont be too much of a problem for you, but any prospective buyers need be aware of the sheer amount of death traps in the game. Plenty of times you will simply not be able to work out what you have to do in a room before it kills you, or worse yet you’ll figure out what you have to do but because you hadn’t started doing it immediately upon entering you’ll die anyway.

I don’t exactly call this a fault, although certainly an imperfection, because the times when this works right (as in any time you don’t die) ensures some incredibly tense platforming. When the walls try to crush you and you only just manage to wall jump between them and blast the barrel that saves you by the skin of your teeth its immensely satisfying. It’s just a shame that not all the puzzles in the game are tweaked to such an extent, leaving others as a frustratingly repetitive chore rather than a self congratulatory triumph. It’s strange because the game otherwise seems designed to always charm the audience, from the great animations of SM himself where he might start running as if he’s a dangerous monster or spread his arms out and make noises like he’s flying a plane, to the abundance of cannon fodder scientists who are simply there half the time to be blown to pieces causing meaty chunks to blast forth from severed appendages, often times falling off the foreground of the otherwise flat 2.5D stage. Special note also needs to be made for the music, which is great throughout, but also ramps up extra elements when you’re busy blasting yourself through the air for some great auditory feedback. There are also some great songs in the game, and the first time you pick up a fat guy eating a doughnut is easily one of the stand out moments of the title.

The boss fights aren’t such a great idea due to the instant-kill nature of pretty much all their attacks. You almost have to execute a perfect routine against their attack patterns or face repeating the whole thing again. Once you’ve fought through them it makes sense but the process of actually getting to that point is rather frustrating. The final boss however isn’t the same, simply because of the satisfying feedback you’re provided with, as each time you detonate a part of him an awesome guitar chord blares, again and again each time you further mutilate him. The ending is simply bizarre, but worth seeing for the awesome live-action dance routine and original music, including a schmaltzy ‘Sixteen Candles’-esque credits track. No, seriously.

Overall it’s a pretty fine game. It’s perhaps a little slower than it could’ve been, and it really isn’t pushing the system as far as we’ve seen in other XBLA games but it’s a definite step up from ‘Maw’, and for £6.50 there’s an awful lot of content to subset the slightly lacklustre visuals. On top of the single-player game there’s four-player local and online coop on an entirely different set of 50 levels. It’s reminiscent of the PDA games from ‘Alien Hominid’ and they’re well worth a play through on the same console, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to complete them online as lag between matchmade players can make it impossible to time explosions correctly. It might be better with friends online, but for the sake of this review it’s not all that important.

It’s great fun, and I definitely recommend it for the asking price. I was initially a little iffy on the concept but I think it was well executed here even if the entire product isn’t quite as cohesive as I would’ve liked. I also now can’t wait to play Explodemon which was announced around the same time if not before, to see just how far it can take this idea further. Curve Studios? Please be bringing it on!