Review Explosive Jake

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Okay, the title art for Explosive Jake and the red bomb in the logo put me more in mind of the superb 8-bit arcade hit BombJack from Tekhan or the epic fun of Bomberman, but the reality for EJ is a rather more tepid affair.

BombJack had crisp mechanics, cool risk-and-reward play, and required knife-edge gaming skills. Bomberman had genius multiplayer mayhem at its core. It is fair to say that Explosive Jake has none of these things.

Instead, you potter around each level, avoiding or ignoring the bots on their pre-set paths, laying bombs to blow up crates to expose the key and exit door to the next level. That's where pretty much the same thing happens, again and again, with the very rare new trick thrown into the mix across 14 stages.

For some reason there's a bit of wiggle room to wander down each passage, making cornering tricky and creating more hassle than is necessary, especially if you do get into a tight corner against a robot or ghost. A few bonuses like extra bomb laying powers drop from time to time, but are in no way essential or exciting.

There's no story as such, just these random creations and layouts that can sprawl over a few screens. And the only challenge is to beat your previous time, but that's hardly a serious one as the items are in the same place each time.

Really, this is a neat tech demo, using the optional CRT effort for a dash of retro goodness, but it doesn't feel like a fully formed game or have any elements that would add anything exciting to the fray. Just a bit more challenge would have helped crank up my interest and the developer is capable as demonstrated in Awesome Pea, which is a better game.

Hopefully PigeonDev, who self-describes as "a lone developer, pretty bad game designer" will plan and think a bit about what made simple games like Thomas Was Alone or Velocity 2X add value, before their next project. Or just rip off the classics, I'd love to see a retro-modern BombJack.

On the plus side, the graphics are crisp and the soundtrack has a sense of adventure that belongs in a totally more exciting game. Just a few tweaks the gameplay and we'd be having a lot more fun with this.

Developer PigeonDev/Sometimes You
Price: £3.99 (PSN)
Score: 4/10
Progress: Suicide by bomb, not in level 7th heaven