Explodemon is a 2D jump'n run in which the players characters main ability is to explode, similar to Splosionman. If one believes the developers Explode however isn't a clone of the later, but was in development even before Splosionman was announced, so it's an unlucky coincidence caused by a delayed release, rather then evil intend. The exploding aside, Explodemon takes a lot of inspiration from Mega Man in it's overall look and feel and character design.
The exploding of the character is used as a propellant for numerous actions, doing a jump followed by an explosion will propell him higher, running to one side and exploding will make him "hyper run", allowing him to break through barriers and enemies and exploding near projectiles will redirect them. The game in turn uses those abilities to construct numerous puzzles, redirecting projectiles or blowing and throwing boxes around is regularly used to trigger switched and open doors.
The overall gameplay of Explodemon works nice and smooth, the controls are responsive and don't have the annoying floatiness often associated with this kind of 2D jump'n run with 3D graphics. The downfall of the game is however it's horrible level design and story telling. Unlike Mega Man, which simply throws a lot of skill oriented obstacles in the players way, Explodemon focuses on switch based puzzles. So to make it a past a room, which is a few screens big, the player doesn't have to make it past enemies, but figure out how to open numerous locked doors. These can be either unlocked by defeating all enemies in the room, putting a box on a switch or exploding a nearby power supply. The problem with those puzzles is that they are not just a short distraction used from time to time, but the very core of the game design. Almost everything in the game is centered around opening doors. What makes those puzzles even more annoying is that they lack variety and challenge. The game has only a very limited number of enemies and items, thus you will see the same stuff over and over again and grow tired of it long before the game is over. The level design is also limited by a rather rigid structure, which forces a very blocky look and the reuse of the same building blocks all over the place. Later in the game the difficulty also ramps up a lot, while the early levels can be mastered without much problem, later ones might require pixel perfect execution, all of that while still just opening doors. An as for boss fights, there is exactly one and that gets repeated over and over again and isn't all that interesting to begin with.
A further annoyance in the game is the story, this is presented with big characters and blocking dialog. I didn't found the writing interesting, thus it just became an annoyance one had to click through after the start of each level. Clicking through the dialog however isn't quite as fast as one would like, so the story is really just irritating and gets in the way. Same applies to the death screen, while you have reset points in each room, the death screen feels disruptive and serves no purpose, it simply delays your restart by a few seconds which just adds more frustration. A further frustration is that dialog that happens at the start of a room is repeated on death and retry.
How the game introduces new actions and mechanics is also rather uneven, as you rarely need any of those actions for regular gameplay and thus it becomes way to easy to overlook or even forget a given action. Right at the start of the game for example the game introduces an impenetratable wall, I can't remember ever seeing that again after the initial introduction. The ability to throw things with precision is also hardly ever used and the dash move seems to be completely unneeded for the core game. I guess some of the stuff might become more relevant when hunting for extra collectables, which I didn't do, but for the core game a lot of stuff just felt useless. Even something basic as the energybar, is kind of convoluted, as even at the end of the game I had no idea how it actually worked. The game also has a shop system, which I only discovered after already finishing the game, it's right there on the level select menu, but the game never hinted at it being there and there is no reason why one would ever spend time on that select screen to begin with.
Overall I didn't enjoy Explodemon much, while I actually do like the core gameplay and the overall look of the game, the lack of variety and awful level design just completely spoil the game. So instead of being a nice homage on Mega Man with a little twist, the game just ends up being a good example on how to not design a game.
I finished the game in 3:30h.
