Splosion Man

Splode?

Splosion Man is kind of a weird name. I found it distasteful at first; I didn’t like the sound of the name when I heard it on a podcast I listen to and that was enough for me to lose interest in it without actually knowing anything about it. It’s scary that I can make a judgement that fast, but that’s what happened. The initial reports out of E3 were pretty vague– nothing to indicate that this was a game worth paying attention to– but for some reason the terrible name stuck in my head, unlike things like Shadow Complex, which I keep trying to call Dark Sector, which was a terrible game from a year or two ago.

Anyway, I had finally mostly forgotten about the game when I heard a discussion about the XBox Live Summer of Arcade, which is a (now traditional?) summer promotion that Microsoft has done where they line up big showcase games for their downloadable games service and release one each week. Last year was a huge deal for me: Geometry Wars 2, Braid, Bionic Command 2, Galaga Legions, and Castle Crashers all came out in a row, and all of those were day 1 purchases for me except for Galaga, which is still more than enough to basically double the number of AAA games in my XBLA library. This year, I wasn’t quite as excited. I’m still thinking of picking up Marvel vs Capcom 2, and I guess I’ll probably try Shadow Complex, but otherwise I was disappointed that it was not quite the star-studded lineup as compared to 2008.

But then I heard an interesting thought from John Davison of What They Play: that despite it being the only $10 title in the whole lineup (the rest are all retailing for 1200 MS Points, which is equivalent to $15), Splosion Man may actually be the best one. I trust his instincts in general, so I decided I should look into Splosion Man and at least consider buying it. When I looked it up online and saw that it was a platformer with only one action outside of moving: “SPLODE”, which is a kind of crude rocket jump in which your character actually explodes and propels himself forward slightly, with bonuses for chain reactions and wall jumps, I knew that the game was something I would have to play, whether or not I approved of the name.

The Meat of the Game

Splosion Man is not an easy game. It is extremely demanding. It requires precision control in a few parts, and good timing and fast reflexes at almost all times. You will outrun all kinds of obstacles, you’ll see the screen flash by as you fly through the air, and if you don’t press A at exactly the right moment you’ll die. In fact, you’re going to die a lot in this game, unless you are some kind of prodigy. When you die, you will be almost instantly resurrected at the last checkpoint in the stage, and in many cases you must begin running again immediately in order to try this time to outrun whatever doom is chasing you.

Occasionally you are presented with puzzles that you can stop and think about; more often they are the kinds of puzzles you’ll solve on your feet– or in the air– and you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment for “improvising” despite the fact that you clearly did exactly what the level designer asked you to do. Either way, it feels good to win. There are varying levels of success, of course: you can complete the stage, but there is also a cake to find in each level (“Caaake!” your avatar will exclaim joyously as you pounce on it, often in slow motion, providing a brief reprieve from whatever ridiculous stunt you had to pull to get to the out-of-reach reward), and if you die after collecting the cake but before reaching a checkpoint, the cake must be collected again. There is a “par time” which determines how many points you get for your time, and generally on my first time through a stage I would have a time anywhere from 3-9x the par time due to replaying portions over and over again after falling prey to particularly cruel death traps.

Here’s the weird thing about the difficulty of Splosion Man, though… it didn’t make me mad. At all. At no point was I any more frustrated than uttering a single groan or maybe one expletive. Once that quick release of anger was over, I would recognize that either a) I had failed, or b) I was being tested on a very particular skill that I needed to master, and I would immediately try again. It’s addictive. There are no load times within a stage, and there are no penalties for dying (short of increasing your completion time, which affects your score, which I guess is good for leaderboards and such), so die all you want. Think you see the cake down in that corner near the pit of acid? Go for it! There was a checkpoint ~15 seconds ago, so why not go down and check things out? Maybe you’ll spend the next two lives figuring out how to get to the cake, then another two or three figuring out how to get back to the main course of the stage, but when Splosion Man jumps on the multi-tiered cake as if he’s about to hug it, you know it was worth it.

The Splode Beneath My Splosion

There are a lot of good decisions on display in this game. First of all, there is a full single player mode as well as a completely separate multiplayer mode. I haven’t played it yet, but the promise of 50 more stages to play is exciting, provided I can get someone to play with me. You can play the multiplayer locally or over XBox Live, which is a nice option that may make it easier for me to find someone to play with. The single player is about the right length, especially considering the variety in the levels. If they had planned on taking the game out of the laboratories at some point I could see wanting another world or two’s worth of levels, but with the slight variations on laboratories I think three worlds for a total of 50 stages felt about right. They also weren’t afraid to make stages shorter when the level design demanded it; near the end I played a few stages that led you through a cool concept for a stage given the game mechanics that was over in only a minute or two. I also liked that you didn’t have any kind of “power up” system or any kind of artificial complication. You are introduced to new mechanics in terms of things you encounter in the levels over the course of the first two worlds, but I think by the time you reach the third world you’ve seen pretty much all of the tools that you’re going to see in the game, they just arrange them in an ingenious fashion to make the game more intense. It’s a very pure game in that respect, and it reminded me of playing games based entirely around smart concepts like Katamari Damacy or the Bit Generations series of games.

The other interesting decision that was made, which I applaud, was the addition of a feature called “Way of the Coward”. Basically, after you’ve died a certain number of times on any level, including the bosses, an image pops up noting that you seem to have died a lot on this particular stage and if you like, you may now pause the game and select “Way of the Coward” to skip that stage. It seems like they are basically saying that you should be allowed to at least have a chance to experience all of the content in the game as long as you give it all a try. Maybe for some reason one particular feat is just too tricky for you and you won’t have any trouble on the next stage. If so, it’s easy to do but it’s still far enough out of the way that I never actually used it. It was nice to know it was there, though, and I imagine there are a number of people who would be glad to use it.

So Not Cool!

Splosion Man has a few weaknesses. The easy out, which I’ve seen in almost everything written about the game that’s longer than a tweet, is that the bosses are frustrating. Almost all of their attacks are one-hit kills, which can be annoying. I spent over ten minutes on the first boss, in large part because I didn’t realize one simple thing, but one thing that these reviews seem to omit is that these bosses aren’t *particularly* difficult, especially if you compare them to the rest of the game. I found the second boss reasonable and blew through the last boss in just a hair over the par time, which almost never happened in any of the regular stages. It’s frustrating to die to a boss so many times, but you can restart as many times as you like just as in the rest of the game and the humor showcased in the bosses makes them totally worthwhile.

The real trouble with Splosion Man, which I’ve decided deserves a name as dumb as the name of the game it’s in, is “sameyness.” The backgrounds ultimately feel very “samey”, all of them taking place in a science lab. You try to remember if you found the cake already in this level or if that was the last level, because they both look pretty similar. Sure, when you pass by a window in World 2 or 3 the background is different, but otherwise the only indication in the art that you’ve shifted worlds is a different dominating neon color. It’s not that important, because the game is ultimately about the play mechanics and the humor and sound design (which I’ll get into shortly), but when you see the environments the boss fights are set in, you’re left wondering why you couldn’t have had a little bit of that variety spread throughout the rest of the worlds as well.

Everybody Loves Donuts

Recently for a video game to be funny it has taken a lot of very specific work— writers writing great dialog and voice actors and animators working together to form beautiful moments of comic genius directed very intentionally. It’s a very direct form of translating the comedy from a movie or a TV show into the cutscenes of a video game. Instead, Splosion Man just oozes amusement. Your avatar, when sprinting down a long corridor, will often stretch out his arms and make airplane noises or hold up his arms menacingly and roar like a monster. He can’t stand still, a perfect characterization of this being made of pure energy, and he mutters some amazing things to himself while he’s running around the levels. I can’t help but think while I’m listening to him that his noises and sound bites could have come across as annoying in the past, especially since you’ll have heard almost everything he has to say after only playing a level or two of the game, but for some reason his insane ramblings are extremely endearing. In particular, I love hearing him say “‘Splode again!” when he reignites after being temporarily extinguished. It’s the perfect cue that I’m ready to begin jumping again, but it’s also really funny and perfectly voiced.

There are more intentional funny moments. As mentioned before, all of the bosses are hilarious. I won’t say anything about the later bosses, but when you meet the first boss for the first time and he smiles and shouts “Have some missiles!” before unleashing a barrage of missiles, I don’t know how anyone with a heart could not forget any doubts they had about this game. There are two or three hilarious songs, which you’ll decide to assume isn’t a response to the popularity of music in recent hit small-press games like Portal or You Have to Burn the Rope, and thankfully the soundtrack is available for download on the game’s website, including one special song in particular.

The sequence just before the credits is amazing. The sequence during the credits is slightly less so, but still funny. I won’t spoil things by saying any more than that.

This Was a Triumph. Wait-

The fact that you read this entire post means that your attention span is long enough to handle replaying tiny fragments of a ridiculous game with great level design, solid controls, and wacky aesthetics unlike anything else out there right now. If you own an XBox 360, you owe it to yourself to buy Splosion Man. I’m going to go ahead and say before any other games have even come out that this is the best game in the Summer of Arcade and will be the best XBLA game so far this year until Trine comes out, at which point (from what I’ve heard) we may need to stop and reevaluate. But until then… go ‘splode.

I still feel dumb saying that.