I grew up on Bomberman and the likes, so once an indie tries to try to take on the Bomberman legacy in an old arcade setting… I’m inquisitive. Welcome to our review of Explosive Jake.
Explosive Jake
Explosive Jake is a classic arcade game, even in it’s setting. When you boot up the game, your Nintendo Switch turns into an old CRT-TV, including scanlines and flickering imagery. There is not much of a story, just a dark dungeon filled with enemies and our hero. This time, it’s not a little guy with a blast suit, but a skeleton with an unhealthy crave of explosions. His goal? Trying to escape from the castle dungeons, blasting his way out.`The game is filled with a total of 40 levels, each with a timer to make the quickest run.
Tutorialistiq
The game does not feature a tutorial, except for some tips from a skeleton-head on a box. It does not offer any suggestions on how to complete the level, but luckily the game is self-explanatory. You don’t need to kill the enemy’s perse, but it can give you some extra items (shields, keys, etc.). And I highly recommend you kill some enemies. Jake has only one life, so once you make a wrong move, bomb or enemy-wise, it’s game over. This was frustrating because some of the levels were pretty big and randomly generated (key-wise), and once you made a wrong move – bam – reset.
Robot-Zombies!
Levels include your basic medieval world (knights), horror world (ghosts and zombies), and the future world (robots). You will occasionally get flame turrets and spinning saws, but aside from that, there’s really nothing else in the 40 levels provided. The banner art on the Nintendo e-shop page is misleading in the way that you see a character resembling Papyrus from Undertale bombing mushrooms, bats, and imps, which are all absent from this game for reasons unknown. So intuitive? No, repetition of the same old song. Explosive Jake could have been much, much more; even with the addition of a little bit of a backstory.
Conclusion
So to conclude: I was hoping for a Cuphead-art-style game, but it reminded me of the NES classics. Right down to the TV glare, you might be able to swear you were playing an old NES game about an undead bomber. It pretty repetitive and not really rewarding, but if you are into the Bomberman-type of games, it’s worth checking out.
