And this is where Splosion Man comes in. Blowing out all that complex, stat driven and in-depth gameplay stuff out the window, Splosion Man goes simple with 2.5D platforming and succeeds on a number of levels that a lot of big budget titles tend to fail at. The setting for Splosion Man is incredibly basic, where you’re a scientific experiment gone madly wrong, infused with the power to explode continuously. With this power your objective is to find your way out of the scientific complex and be free in the world. That’s it, pretty much the story in surmised in a small paragraph.
FLATULENCE!
But who needs a complicated and in-depth story when the game is so much fun? The entire point of the game is to run around and ‘explode’, which is essentially your attack and your jump. You can chain a total of 3 explosions before waiting a few seconds to recharge, and the game puts you into some challenging and fast paced scenarios. Bouncing off walls with explosions and blowing barrels up to get speed boosts through areas is ridiculously fun and doesn’t seem to get old.
It’s a simple gameplay style and mechanic, but its simplicity works extremely well with the very intelligent level design and set ups. Sometimes you’ll have to time your explosions correctly to get out of a room that is closing in on you, other times you have to time your jumps at breakneck speed before water floods the entire room. Every level has a very clever design to it, forcing you to think quick and pray you pulled the timing off. In fact Splosion Man reminds us much of the old days of 2D Sonic, where the game has a very quick pace to it but some crazy timing in jumps and such are required to pass some difficult tasks. The only downside were some of the boss battles, as we felt they were a little tedious and repetitive and broke the superb pacing throughout the other levels. They’re still decent, but as opposed to the rest of the game they’re hardly highlights.
Everybody loves doooonnutttss...
Apart from Splosion Man’s awesome gameplay, the visuals are quite a sight to behold too. Though it doesn’t hold triple-A levels of visual clarity, the game has a lot of personality with some neat use of effects. Splosion Man in particular is an awesome character with an insane but charming look and feel, and his animations are fantastic, showing that hand animated characters and believability is sometimes a far better alternative in a video game than going for realism and mo-cap. The audio side also adds a lot of character to the already charming world, with humorous and often crazy phrases being blurted out by Splosion Man as he explodes. Music also captures the frenetic and comical world too, with quirky and upbeat tunes being played as you dash through the levels exploding about.
Splosion Man is a wonderful testament to old school games, with its simplistic but fun gameplay and huge sense of character. Featuring over 50 single player levels, players are in for a hefty challenge which will last them a few hours. Once this is done as well, you have the time trials too which are essentially speed runs of all the levels, and then there’s multiplayer which adds an interesting twist to the core gameplay. For 800 points, Splosion Man is a steal, and it’d be a shame if you didn’t pick it up.
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