
Finally got my Steam backlog back down after that one user mentioned the up-to-date paid-now-free games thread in that one Steam group, so I’ve been tackling my itch.io backlog recently. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much noteworthy there so far. Explobers has an interesting premise, but the execution is lackluster, with the puzzle elements being not hard and the action elements just being you replaying the level up to the point you need to blow yourself up or turn into another platform.
Though I did have to go back to Steam for a bit since I happened to win another game on SG:
Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X shoots, and Y uses your grapple. You can also push B to use a subweapon and LT to dodge, but I found myself not needing to do those very much. The game showers you with equippable upgrades and even a few different guns, but not only does a lot of that equipment have specific activation qualities, you also have very limited equipment slots (with the game being much more stingy handing out increases for that), so you’ll find yourself sticking to the same build for most of the game. The game has many rooms where you have to kill all the enemies to progress, which I’ve never been a fan of, but on the plus side, it rarely sends out more waves after the initial ones are defeated, and the differing level designs/enemy placements helps prevent things from becoming too stale. That said, there were a few mandatory enemy killings that didn’t have the HUD icon letting you know about them, which did bother me.
First thing I noticed is that progress in the demo doesn’t transfer to the full game, so not only did I have to replay the desert level where enemy bullets are hard to see, but I also had to go through the early test chambers where the game regresses your build and you’re stuck with that slow-firing pistol. Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for the game to give you a rapid-fire upgrade to bring your weapon closer to what was promised in the first level, but it’s always a pet peeve when a game starts you out with stuff and then takes them away, more so when it’s like this game where they don’t even have the excuse of it maybe being too overwhelming for new players to get used to.
Second thing I noticed is that the full game is much easier than the demo, maybe even a bit too easy. The sword enemies don’t attack as quickly, which effectively means you can always kill them before they finish running up to you, and the first boss went down super quick with my default loadout (I had to change my equipment to beat the demo’s version of the boss). The rest of the game also struggles to maintain a difficulty curve: you think things are picking up in the desert level when the purple portals send you to the grassy area with the chasing fireball and the orbiting purple balls, but then those hazards never show up again after that level. Even the final boss didn’t put up much of a fight, effectively letting me stand between its hazards and drain its health bar in 10 seconds or so (for both phases). What makes the final boss extra disappointing is that the level prior actually did pick things up a bit.
However, the level before the last one was hard for the wrong reasons. First, it takes away your guns and forces you to use a short-range sword. Second, it introduces shielded enemies, so the sword doesn’t even kill them in one hit unless you try to run past them to destroy the enemy generating the shields (and you also have to notice that this is what’s happening because the game is kinda subtle about it), and even then it can still sometimes take 2+ attacks to kill an unshielded enemy. Then, after making you go through nearly a whole level of that (complete with several kill-all-enemies rooms), the last few rooms add a visual effect where the platforms won’t form until you get close, and then it introduces fake dark-grey platforms that do the exact opposite, fragmenting and disappearing when you get close! You’re also forced to fight a three-phase boss with the sword while also doing timed platforming between the phases. It doesn’t help that this level comes shortly after the two-hour refund window, as if the devs knew it’d be a turn-off for lots of people who enjoyed the game up to this point (the demo also has zero indication that there’d be anything like this in the full game).
There’s also a similar level you unlock after beating the game, where you’re forced to use a super-short-range knife to reflect bullets and you die in one hit, but I gave up on that level after a few deaths.
Overall, the game’s kinda mediocre. I did have some fun with the game, but only some fun in the rest of the game makes it hard to justify the lack of fun in the mandatory sword level. If you’re interested, wait for a really good sale.
P.S. If you play games for the story, then you really won’t like this game since its plot twist just kinda happens and the game ends with a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe it’s funnier in the original Chinese; I dunno.