The Splatters sounds like the name of a performance act on America’s Got Talent. Instead, it’s a physics-based puzzle game by SpikySnail Games. It seems as though April is the month of XBLA puzzle games this year. With the choices we have this month, The Splatters should be one of them on your list.
Take the simplicity of Angry Birds, add color coding, subsets of special moves that you can pull off and you have yourself The Splatters. Controlling the blob-like creatures and propelling them into the environment to explode and have their remains cover the bombs in the level is the main goal in The Splatters. Starting out, I wasn’t that excited for how the game was presenting the puzzles to me. It was a little too easy. I know, you have to ease people into your mechanics of the game, usually having the first couple of levels being the tutorial. Then I found myself at the end of the main puzzles after only a couple of hours! Where did my time go? Was I having that much fun with the puzzles that I never noticed that I was way past the tutorial phase?
What made the time go by so fast in the main puzzles is my only gripe with The Splatters. About every five puzzles or so, another ability was introduced. It never felt like I was given the freedom to just try out all the crazy abilities I was given without another tutorial explaining the next ability I unlocked. Once you get the final ability, the main puzzles just sort of end. It would have been better to have a lot more puzzles at the end instead of letting the player go back to earlier levels to use the new abilities to get a higher score and three star that puzzle.
There are two other modes to satisfy your puzzle solving appetite in the form of Master Shots and Combo Nation. No leaderboards are in Master Shots mode which makes it hard to want to do well if there is no incentive to climb to the top of your friends list. Combo Nation is like the name implies, try to get your combo multiplier as high as possible using all your abilities to get the highest score on that puzzle. Good luck with that too since after seeing some of the videos you can watch from others in Splatter TV, I wondered if these top players on the leaderboards ever go outside instead of playing this game all day to figure out the best way to get the highest combo score. I am just happy to upload my video if I get all the bombs in one run.
I know most people are looking towards Fez and Trials Evolution this month in lieu of The Splatters but I implore you to give it a shot since it is an interesting take on the physics-based puzzle genre and represents a decent amount of fun to be had.