'Splosion Man
Posted by Xander Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:19:00 GMT
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.
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