Ms. Splosion Man Still Blows Up Real Good, 15 Years Later

Ms. Splosion Man arrived on Xbox 360 on July 13, 2011, as the sequel to 2009’s ‘Splosion Man, and it wastes no time getting to the joke. At the Big Science after-party celebrating the capture of Splosion Man, a scientist spills a bottle of liquid onto some electrical wiring. The surge hits an experimentation platform just as a yellow bow falls onto it. Out of that accident comes Ms. Splosion Man, a character made entirely of explosive material.

Twisted Pixel Games built the thing. Microsoft Studios and Twisted Pixel published it. The game landed on Xbox 360 and Windows Phone at launch, then spread to PC, iOS and eventually Nintendo Switch on November 22, 2018. It is a platform game with indie and arcade in its bones, played from a side view, in single player, multiplayer and co-operative modes.

This is a sequel that understands what a sequel is for.

Trailer, via Zen Studios.

Two Campaigns, Fifty Levels Each

The structure is generous to a fault. Ms. Splosion Man packs fifty levels of single player and a separate fifty level co-op multiplayer campaign, which means the game carries two full campaigns if you have someone to play with. The aim in both is to “splode” through puzzles, traps and enemies. A splode works as a jump. It also kills scientists and robots, demolishes walls, detonates explosive barrels and triggers other effects.

The core of that loop is inherited straight from the predecessor, and Twisted Pixel does not pretend otherwise. What the studio adds is the interesting part: energy rails the protagonist can ride, and cannons that toss her in specific directions, some of which the player can control. Those two mechanics change how a level reads. A rail turns a gap into a route. A cannon turns a route into a decision.

The Map That Lets You Skip

The most valuable addition is not a mechanic at all. It is an apology.

Players complained about the difficulty of the first ‘Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel listened. Ms. Splosion Man contains an overworld that clearly marks each level’s difficulty and lets players skip the harder ones if they choose. That is a small design decision with a large effect: it converts a wall into a menu. Nobody has to quit a game because one level is unreasonable.

Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford said the overworld map was inspired by Super Mario World, and that it holds similar secrets, including secret exits. That lineage shows. The map is not a loading screen with a number on it. It is a place, and it rewards the same curiosity the levels do.

For the first time in the series, the character escapes the fictional Big Science facilities and ventures out into the world. The single-player and co-op campaigns both include levels set outside. After two games of corridors and laboratories, daylight is a real change of scene, and the game uses it.

One Player, Two Characters

Then there is the mode nobody asked for and everybody should try.

2 Girls 1 Controller enables a single player to play through the cooperative campaign controlling both Ms. Splosion Man and Splosion Man at the same time. One person, two characters, one controller. It sounds like a party trick. It plays like a stress test, because the co-op campaign was designed around two people splitting attention and now one person owns all of it.

The broader co-op offering is the stronger draw. A separate fifty level campaign is not a handful of bonus stages bolted onto the side. It is a second game with its own levels and its own demands, and it is the reason to keep the game installed after the credits.

What the Scores Said

Ms. Splosion Man was generally very well received. Aggregate websites GameRankings and Metacritic report scores in the 85% range. Individual scores ran from a 60% approval up to multiple perfect scores. The published critical score sits at 8.3/10 across five outlets.

The praise clustered around two things. Reviewers felt the game was a great expansion and improvement over the original. They also lauded its humor. The complaints were specific and fair: long load times between levels, and increased difficulty over ‘Splosion Man.

That table is the whole argument for the sequel in one glance.

Load Times and the Difficulty Spike

Neither criticism is noise. Long load times between levels are a genuine tax on a game built around retrying short, sharp challenges. When a level takes seconds to play and the wait between attempts is longer than the attempt, the rhythm breaks. Twisted Pixel never solved that here.

The difficulty complaint is more complicated. The game is harder than its predecessor, and the overworld skip exists precisely because the studio knew it. The skip is the right fix. It does not make the hard levels easier, and it should not. It makes them optional, which is the honest way to handle a spike.

Why the Overworld Matters Most

Ms. Splosion Man is the definitive edition for any splosion connoisseur, and that phrase is doing real work. Expanded map features, tons of unlockables and ghost replays round out a package that treats the original as a draft rather than a finished thought.

You got a problem? Yo, she’ll splode it.

The humor holds up because it never strains for depth. A character made entirely of explosive material who solves every problem by exploding is a one-joke premise, and the game knows it, so it spends its energy on level design instead. The rails and cannons are not decoration. They are the reason the two campaigns do not blur together, and the reason the co-op campaign stands on its own.

What matters most, though, is the overworld. A studio responding to player complaints about difficulty by handing players a map and a skip button is a small act of respect, and it is the detail that separates this from a quick sequel. The load times remain a flaw. The difficulty remains a spike. Neither sinks a game this confident about what it is.

Ms. Splosion Man earns its place as one of the better platform sequels of its year, and it earns it by fixing the first game rather than repeating it.

co-op · game review · Ms. Splosion Man · Platformer · Twisted Pixel · Xbox 360