Detonate
by Lew Reed on Wednesday 17th Feb 2010

Uninspired visuals aren't the only flaw.

Looking at the blueprint alone, you’d see some obvious flaws in Detonate’s design. It’s a physics based puzzle game and, as expected, there’s a lot to take into consideration when planting your explosives to get the flashing green line to hit the non-flashing green line by destroying a structure a certain way. 

This double edged sword of replicating the smallest details in movement is both Detonate’s undoing and its promise of potential. Here is where the foundations start to shake. When you’re really bored at work/school/lectures and you throw scrunched up paper in the bin from a considerable distance, you always try to see if you can do it again. However, despite gravity being constant and wind speed minimal indoors, you just can’t replicate that first shot. A similar quandary presents itself with bomb placement when you try and repeat a successful hit – the problems being the touch interface and the size of the average human finger. It’s hard enough picking up one of the multi-directional bombs to plant next to the girders you want out of the way, but putting them in precisely the right place? Well that’s just damn near impossible, and becomes annoying when you know how to solve a puzzle but can’t get the bomb in quite the right place. Even once you’ve put a bomb where you want it, if you select the next one before changing the delay time, you can’t just go back and change it.

Also a result of this unpredictability is how the levels can simply be brute-force attacked until things go your way, usually by complete luck. At level eight, however, Detonate shows us what it has been trying to accomplish: aim your explosion at a specific weak-point, and watch as the tower crumbles almost exactly where you wanted it to. In subsequent levels - there are 3 in total - you really get a feel for what the game is looking to accomplish, and there are occasional glimpses of hope when you get exactly the results you’re expecting and solve a puzzle without much hassle. However, most of the levels’ designs are dampened by unpredictability. Compounded with the unreliable interface you’ll more often than not just brute-force attack a level until you get lucky; this works far too often. Breaking the game is optional, of course, but when you’re at that stage the more pertinent point is why you chose to do it, and it boils down to the game asking for precision where you can’t provide it.

This might be forgivable for a game with aesthetic hooks, or at least some form of distraction from the core of the game - unfortunately Detonate is entirely devoid of such luxury. The soundtrack consists of some title screen music and a couple of sound effects and the bland visuals are merely there because they have to be. The game doesn’t make appropriate use of its building blocks, resulting in a pretty poor puzzler for £1.19. It feels more like a proof of concept - which is occasionally validated - and we hope that it can serve as a lesson for future attempts at making this solid concept into something a bit more refined.