xbox live indie game reviews

Pros: There are a number of things which Melvin's Meltdown does very well.  I found the art style throughout the game to be very charming.  The music was catchy and well-matched to the gameplay style, never seeming to get overly repetative.  The idea of chain reactions is on its face cool, and it falls into familiar Match-N puzzler gameplay styles.  There were also several interesting tweaks on the genre, including a resource management system which rewarded combos versus simple elimination of all barrels.  Skull barrels provided an extra layer of focus which one had to pay attention to lest you get quickly overrun by damage-resistant barrels.

Cons: There were issues with screen boundaries (I play on a 32" widescreen hdtv) which rendered pieces of the play field and tutorials unreadable.  Because of they way the combo scoring worked, I found at the start of each level there were significant periods of waiting for more barrels to drop before it became worth it to start clearing them.  Though I liked the idea of the limited number of shots per colored laser, I never found myself limiting my shots or really even running low on a particular color.  The difficulty did not ramp up smoothly -- in the early stages of the game things proceed very slowly.  After about 6 levels, things began to pick up in difficulty and require more focus; by around 8 levels, things go from somewhat manageable to being almost too fast to follow and I quickly devolved into button mashing (which proved to be effective).  In playing the game for a couple of hours, I never managed to successfully detonate a bomb.

Conclusion: Melvin's Meltdown does a number of things very well and shows a great amount of potential, both for the developers and for the things people can do with the Creators Club.  I think that the developers could simplify the gameplay a bit and add some tuning to the difficulty and have an easily reccomendable title on their hands.  As a stand-alone game however, I find myself unable to reccomend a purchase as the demo will encompass most of the better points of the gameplay.  At only 200 microsoft points, it does present itself as a rather nice tech demo for good integration of various puzzler components.