Boom! Buster was a game I was heavily looking forward towards. Its concept reminded me somewhat of the Older Mario V Donkey Kong Games with the stylings of newer recent madcap/cartoony platformers. Overtime however it was difficult to ignore the sudden swerve and decisions made regarding the development of the game and how it was brought out. While I have given it a fair shot despite this, I am sad to say this game hasn't really met any expectations regardless of how level I try to be about the circumstances surrounding it.

To start with the positives

* The Music is still pretty good. the lyrics and funky beat match the acrobatic gameplay and are easy on the ears
* Movement is mostly fun and you have a few ways of chaining and getting around which feel rewarding when you properly combo and pick up bombs
* Backgrounds and art style are also pretty alright. a few fun background things you can pick up on in between moments without having to rush for bombs.

Unfortunately BOOM! Buster lets me down much more than it uplifts me, although some of this is subjective on my part, due to the aforementioned issues with its release.

*The sound mixing is mostly fine, except for any time an explosion happens? I lowered the SFX to 10% after the first time and both me and my friend who heard still don't really enjoy the noise. this happens when they get launched at The Wizard too, I'm unsure if this is a deliberate choice since this is a game about bombs but please for the love of god have mercy on headphone players and people they stream for.
* The sudden shift to dying in one hit is a bit irksome because there's a bit of friction when it comes to certain things. The timing of enemy spawns and learning where bombs drop can throw off an otherwise nice run, more margin for error outside of changing the powerup to a shield wou ld have felt nice.
* Speaking of dying, the sudden shift to having a bit of gory cartoon violence feels really off. Perhaps emphasized unintentionally by the loud explosion issue, Buster explodes into (admittedly still cartoonish) viscera and bits upon failure to sort a bomb, or death by certain things, and his bloodstains remain in the level on attempts after. I'm not so disturbed by this that I need to clutch pearls over it, but tonally its very strange and the change is unwelcome frankly, and feels like a weird attempt to add some edge to a game which wants to have slapstick explosions against the big bad(especially weird since another death animation is just the equivalent "falling off screen" bit mario games do)
* Short hops don't exist, all jumps are max height regardless of jump pressing time. this usually isn't an issue since levels are fairly open and meant for acrobatic play, but one level with tight platforms and enemies means i end up jumping into an enemy above me because I may need to jump over something in front of me that I can't slide or spin into.
* No one can convince me the redesigns to Buster will ever be good frankly. It might work slightly better in the sequel game, but here the addition of hair, pupils, and the changing of his goggles to be just eyes makes him look like a watered down weird teenage boy.
* The Wizard Boss fights don't feel frantic enough, and the first one has lost its spark from the demo due to having to shorten the pace to presumably accommodate dying in one hit. It was very fun having the wizard react frustratedly with voice clips and firing a last ditch barrage of spells at you in the final stretch, small things like this are what added to the identity of the game. That doesn't happen anymore, and the spells don't really interfere enough i think or interestingly shift what's going on. I made it up to the second boss and it wasn't much better either, I have to wonder what the difference between a miniboss and boss would have been as well.

This game is otherwise functional and works fine, didn't encounter bugs during my short attempt, but it is difficult for me to earnestly recommend. The game has clearly strayed from its original vision and I am sat here disappointed I sympathize with the hardships that come with finding your footing in putting out a game as a small studio, I feel as though it was handled poorly and it shows blatantly in the final product.

TL;dr : The game is an alright arcade puzzle platformer in a few aspects with good simple gameplay, but smaller issues combined with poor handling in an attempt to carve out a specific niche or identity leave this game feeling like a dud.

pretty good, but no kickstarter backer credits??? i feel a bit cheated imo.

To sum up my thoughts: I'd give it an in-between thumbs if I could, but I can't.

DISCLAIMER: I originally backed this game on Kickstarter, where it was initially planned to be a game much different from the game's final product. While I won't comment on how the development was handled and how it , I do hold a bit of a bias towards the original demos rather than what we got in the end and may reference the demos I played as a point of reference.

There's a lot of good stuff here!
- The general atmosphere of the game is well-set. Characters are well-defined and funny in the cutscenes, though I wish there was more of that to be seen in actual gameplay.
- The soundtrack is fire, even if the songs themselves are a bit short for how long they play in-game. Either way, they're frantic and set the mood pretty well.
- The controls are mostly good and always responsive and the art and animation is generally alright.
- The main mechanics of platforming and bomb-sorting are excellently done, and the game paces the introductions of new gimmicks pretty well.
- The inclusion of two-player co-op is a welcome surprise I haven't gotten around to playing yet, but it sounds like a lot of fun.

There's a few things that I don't particularly like but are easily managed.
- The removal of a health system which at least comes with an shield meter you can fill to be able to take an extra hit. Filling said shield meter takes an annoyingly-long time (more on that later), which is barely mitigated by the occasional shield freely dropping in every three levels or so.
- I'm also not a fan of death-limit achievements. Now obviously I'm not good at this game (it just came out, duh) but objectively "complete a run without dying" is a boring achievement to see and a tedious one to do. Typically difficult games have segmented perfection achievements so players can work towards it level-by-level. But honestly I don't think I really like this game enough to be going for all achievements so I can just ignore this.
- Back to the controls, the skid-turn the characters make doesn't play well with the directional-importance of backflipping, and safely dropping bombs being something done by crouching and spinning rather than just having a button to do that. However, both of those gripes are minor as neither action is something necessary very often.
- The sound mixing has a few minor mixing issues, but it's really just voice clips (which can be turned off) and the ridiculously-loud explosion sound effects that play in each boss fight. This will probably be fixed at some point, but wasn't on release which is rather stinging as the game had already missed its intended release date.
- This last one is a bit of a nitpick, but when the player character dies they explode into a gorey corpse and stain the level with blood. I would actually like this if the rest of the game thematically fit it. But it doesn't: neither the Wizard nor the various enemies are gored when you kill them. They just die in a cartoonish fashion with a funny face on. For such an unnecessary design choice, you would think there would be more thought put into similar violence to emphasize it.

There's also a lot of stuff I just don't like at all, unfortunately.
- Primarily the shift to an entirely "score-attack" kind of game, like an arcade game. The initial screen-to-screen gameplay works for it quite well, but weakens the structure of what the game calls a "campaign."
- Bonus stages that you play at the end of each act are your only "break" from the regular gameplay, and even then they have strict time limits and defined platforming routes that you can't deviate from if you want a perfect clear.
- Some levels are annoyingly long, and with one hit always sending you back to the beginning, you'll have to suffer though the same beginnings multiple times in order to reach difficult sections. This only gets worse as the game goes on. The last act (which I got bored of playing and haven't completed as of writing this) is obviously the biggest offender.
- Boss fights are also no longer have the push-and-pull between moments of dodging spells and bomb-sorting, which I initially thought was an issue but really is a side-effect of the biggest issue with the fights in general: the Wizard's lack of involvement. He's just not much of a threat, even worse than that he is almost completely silent in these fights, which is SO lame considering he had voicelines in the Kickstarter demo.
- Collecting the slimeballs or whatever they are to build up the shield meter gets really annoying as no more can appear until after you collect the ones already on the screen, meaning if you miss any you have to decide whether or not to double-back so the next wave can spawn. And in a game where doubling-back is typically a death sentence, there's really no decision to be made.