Seriously, downloadable games just plain rock. While they’re obviously still attractive and the production values are often quite high, they’re much more reliant by design on great gameplay and solid concepts. In other words, in order to succeed, they need to be fun.
Splosion Man is a perfect example of the reason I get so excited about new downloadable titles. It’s a game created by an indie developer—Twisted Pixel Games—who clearly knows their stuff. It’s also a very simple concept: you’re a strange being residing in a lab (escaping, really) where hordes of scientists seek to study you. Why, precisely, you might ask? Well, you see, because you’re made entirely of splosion, a volatile compound that results in your exploding and propelling yourself around the environments with associated debris in tow. And seeing as there are myriad scientists and sophisticated high-dollar equipment populating the labs (and Splosion Man is about as carefree and positively insane as volatile experimental living compounds come), that’s a recipe for disaster.
Pressing A makes Splosion Man ‘splode, sending him flying upward (think of it as a jump) and annihilating anything near him in the process. Scientists are instantaneously turned into fragments of T-bone steak and other pieces of cartoonish meat, and inanimate objects are blown to bits, all while the characters in the game spew referential morsels of modern pop culture—it’s hilarious. Meanwhile, the player is more concerned with getting Splosion to the end of each of the fifty single-player stages by propelling him around the levels, leaping off walls and using the mid-air triple-jump mechanics to navigate areas filled with spikes, moving platforms, and a variety of trials and puzzles. One area, for instance, required us to switch off a bunch of snow which prevented us from ‘sploding our way to a platform above.
But where things really get interesting is when you team up with a friend over local or Xbox Live. There’s fifty more levels specific to multiplayer (are you reading this, Nintendo?), and while at first they’re pretty tame, they quickly escalate into challenging teamwork sequences that require you to master the art of exploding off your partner to propel him higher or in opposite directions and all sorts of other evil mechanics. One part in particular (shown in our HD video footage of the E3 demo) takes a page from the Battletoads book, challenging you to fall down a shaft lined with electricity, hitting inconveniently-placed switches as you go to shut off deadly electric within your partner’s shaft, who just so happens to be doing precisely the same thing simultaneously to allow you to continue. So the net result is that if either one of you screws up and hits the electric or misses a switch, both of you fail.
In the demo, Mike and I completed this portion of the level (and thus the demo itself), prompting an animated yet vulgar exclamation of disbelief from both of us. Because at DigitalChumps, that’s how we roll.
Anyway, I hope you’ll roll with my review of the title in a matter of weeks prior to its release this summer sometime. It’s a truly creative gem of a cooperative platformer and it looks to be well worth any Xbox 360 owner’s time.
Stay tuned for more very soon.