Too Long; Didn't Play: Explosionade

Time ‘Sploded: 36 minutes

Sponsored By: Catphoenix

Party Popper Review

Oh, hell, I can’t resist:

I was going to say “When life gives you explosions, make Explosionade!”

Then I looked at some promotional material for the game, and saw that the PR department beat me to it.

Whatever, it’s still a good joke. For certain values of “good,” that is.

Atomic Warhead Review

I’m not entirely sure where to begin with Explosionade. There isn’t much to it. Explosionade is, essentially, a love letter to Metal Slug.

You play as a pathetic figure in a military organization stationed on some distant planet. After a poorly explained accident, you’re stuck home cleaning the latrines while the other soldiers get to shout at each other and shoot things. In the course of your duties (get it?) you find a heavily armed walking tank prototype and decide to take it out for a spin.

Eventually, you spot some enemy troops in the sewers and give chase, which only brings to mind the question of how much fiber these people must eat that they have sewers big enough to pilot a giant mech with jump-jets through.

The military organization isn’t explicitly named, so I’ve decided to call them The Gundam Regulars. (Get it!? Poop jokes!)

From this point, you just complete level after level of traversal-puzzles where you use your mech’s special abilities to break down walls, kill things, and collect chits to fuel and repair your mech. The writers decided that your mech runs on solid gold bars, thus saving a lot of effort in collectible-object asset creation.

Explosionade is a very generic sort of platforming shoot-em-up, but this is not the same thing as saying it’s bad. The controls are incredibly well dialed in, so even though the early level design is somewhat less than inspired, driving the mech is still fun. Using grenades to smash through walls and get the drop on unsuspecting enemies is fun, as is using your shield’s secondary ability to bounce around the level like a flea on a hot brick.

The animation is quite good, and you can tell that there are a lot of frames of animation packed into those Neo Geo-quality sprites.

And that’s the main rub for this game: Your enjoyment of Explosionade will depend almost wholly on your affinity for mid-1990’s arcade-game design. The sprites, animation, action and level design are all exactly on par with what I would have expected to see in an arcade as a kid. Looking back and remembering those days, I can understand the appeal of playing a game that looks exactly like an old arcade game in my very own home, and the novelty of playing something brand new that looks like it was some lost treasure from those days is what’s powering me through the game.

Without that nostalgia shot, I’m left with some – if I can be honest – mediocre game design and dated graphics, with a few tongue-in-cheek dialog scenes where the game makes fun of itself, which seem a little too on-the-nose.

Oh yeah, let’s talk about that for a moment. I’ve read good satire. I’ve even written some satire which is, if I may brag, passable. The humor in Explosionade isn’t good satire. This is what a person thinks is satire when their only experience with the thing they’re satirizing is reading other people’s satire of it. On a scale of Matt Hazzard to Broforce, this ranks a lot closer to the former than the latter, and is saved only by the quality of the gameplay.

Will I Keep Playing?

I’ll keep playing this as long as I kept playing the sorts of games this game is attempting to ape, which is to say I’ll probably put another hour or two into it and move on. It's good for what it is, but that seems to be all it is.

It’s not a big, meaty game. It’s more of a palate-cleanser to consume between main dishes like Doom and aperitifs like Battleborn that are consumed on the way to fluffy dessert items like Lovely Weather We’re Having. It resides in a culinary subgenre along with games like Luftrausers, though it’s nowhere near as well done.

Incidentally, have you noticed I do a lot of food metaphors in this space? That’s because I tend to write them either during lunch or before dinner.

Is it the Devil Daggers of Metal Slug-inspired mech games?

Aside from a bizarre difficulty spike in the early levels, I can’t give this one the coveted Devil Daggers Equivalent score. It’s just not hard enough to be interesting, or interesting enough to be hard.

Four out of twenty daggers, if I must put a number to it.

Comments

Added to wishlist. *thumbsup*

Decent but redundant.