The negative Steam reviews for this game seem to have a common thread of “it’s not as fun as Splosion Man.” Well, that game isn’t on Steam, soo…

• Explodemon
  

  4 hours playtime

  7 of 20 achievements

This is an action platformer. Along with your standard left/right movement and jump abilities, you attack by creating an explosion on your person (which doesn’t harm you, of course), at which point there’s a ~1 second cool-down before you can explode again (unless you can combo an enemy, which lets you explode multiple times in a row). If you go too long without exploding, a countdown will start, and you’ll explode automatically when it reaches zero. Also, you can jump higher if you explode right after jumping.

The main thing I want to point out is that the level design is pretty good for the most part, which is a refreshing change of pace after playing Hey Ice King, Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?! They aren’t just flat, horizontal segments or dull vertical segments; there’s a decent variety to how levels are structured (so even the easy parts stay interesting, especially if you’re trying to get the optional explodicons), and there’s even a decent amount of challenge near the end with the introduction of segments where you have to outrun rising acid.

However, this game does have one of my biggest pet peeves with modern platformers: at certain areas, the level will go into lock-down and you’ll have to fight a few waves of enemies to progress. This happens at least once per level (if I remember correctly), and it really just comes across like padding, especially since your health bar is so ridiculously huge and since you regain health by defeating enemies. Plus, the different lock-down arenas aren’t different enough from each other to provide a new or interesting challenge. In other words, you’ll never die directly from enemy attacks in this game, no matter how bad you are at video games. Even at the start of levels (where you always begin at the lowest health possible), getting hit only sets you into a “danger” mode that wears off after a few seconds (I think getting hit in this “danger” mode will get you killed, but I don’t have first-hand experience with that). The only things that will kill you in this game are instant-death hazards like pits and acid pools, two things that slowly become more prevalent as the game progresses (you can differentiate death pits from downward progression by the gradient effects). Even then, you don’t have to worry too much since dying will merely set you back to the beginning of the room.

My other major complaint is that there’s only one boss that gets reused throughout the entire game. Not just the same AI, the same boss. Yes, the first boss you fight is the same as the second one is the same as the last one. To be fair, you fight this boss in varying arenas, and since you have to launch projectiles onto the boss to defeat it, this does help to add a bit of variety to what is essentially the same boss fight. However, since your health bar is so large and since launching objects (especially moving missiles) is so finicky, the later battles are more annoying than they are challenging (again, no enemy attacks will kill you in this game).

Aside from those issues, this is a pretty good game overall, and I’d recommend it if you like platformers.

P.S. Some of the explodicons require knowledge of how the game’s physics work, but it isn’t until after you beat the boss a couple times when you get an upgrade that shows the trajectory of an object if you explode where you are. I guess you can check the “forced backtracking for 100%” off the list of my pet peeves, too.