Explosive Jake

Genre: Top-Down Action / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Explosive Jake is a Top-Down Action / Arcade game released on PC in 2019 and brought to other platforms, including Nintendo Switch, in 2019. And I’m not going to beat around the bush – this is a shameless Bomberman clone, and a poor one, at that.

At the very least, I can’t fault this game in its presentation, which goes for an old-school pixel art look that works well enough, and a chiptune soundtrack that’s actually fairly decent. If this were a better game, this look might help to give the game a nostalgic feel.

It’s not a better game, though. The movement in this game is slower than Bomberman, and on top of that even though the levels are arranged in a very Bomberman-esque grid, your movement isn’t directly tied to that grid, meaning you can easily move off-center in a square. This might not be so bad, expect that it apparently interferes with bomb placement, and players will soon be frustrated by the inability to place bombs because they were off-center too often.

Oh, and ask any Bomberman fan what the best part of a Bomberman game is, and you know what they’ll tell you? The multiplayer… which this game does not have. No, it’s just the slow-paced, unimaginative, poorly-designed main campaign.

I always say that it’s okay to copy another game, so long as you do it well. Explosive Jake copies a great game franchise, but does so very poorly. It’s not worth your time.

tl;dr – Explosive Jake is a low-effort unimaginative Bomberman clone with slow pacing, poor controls, and no multiplayer. Don’t waste your time or money on this.

Grade: D

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Laziest Copycat

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