Splody

I'm an expert in Bomberman but I have only tested this game for an half hour to check the game mechanics. Here are my impressions.
TL;DR:
++ Competitive online gameplay with ranking.
-- No controls configuration (for now). The developers don't seem to think this feature is useful since there are only 2 buttons.
My general impression: I recommend this game for couch gaming but this game is not tight enough for competitive Bomberman players so I won't recommend it for competitive.
In details:
Pros:
++ First and most important point: competitive online game play. I have only a bunch of friends who likes Bomberman and among them only 3 who are really good at it. Bringing online game play with competitive rank is the major and most important feature that no other Bomberman did outside Japan. Unfortunately I haven't tested it so I can't say if it's any good but I do believe this is the most important feature for a Bomberman game.
++ There are 2 kind of Bombermans in my opinion: classic ones (Bomberman 93', 94, Mega Bomberman, Saturn Bomberman) and the Super Nintendo ones. This game is clearly a classic one. I personally dislike the SNES-like ones so this is an important point for me.
+ Almost all you need to know is in the doc on their website:
+ Up to 128 players. This is the kind of game that is fun to play with 10 people on the same screen. Very cool feature for local multiplayer but I believe this is not suitable for competitive (2, 4 or 5 players are the good numbers (3 is unbalanced, more than 5 is messy)).
+ The screenshots look bad but I must say the graphics are actually quite nice. Especially the forest style and the classic green background with bricks.
+ Character customization. You can pick one of the 6 skins and select 2 colors of your choice to customize it.
+ King of the hill mode (not tested)
Deal breaker:
- No controls configuration (for now)
I'm not sure what is the intention of the developers exactly because they did add a control configuration menu to the game but apparently it does nothing (at least for the gamepad configuration) and on the website they seems to think it is not useful: "There is no in-game controller configuration, as there are only two main actions ("primary" - drop bomb, and "secondary" for pinging and powerups) and all face buttons should automatically be assigned alternatingly to those two actions."
Their argument sounds okay but in my personal opinion this makes the game unsuitable for competitive game. Imagine any other game you play competitive without being able to adapt the controls. I'm very used to the Saturn Bomberman controls so any other configuration makes me lose a little bit.
Cons:
- No kangaroo/dino ability (no need for a third button)
- Remote control. It uses the same button to detonate it than to stop a bomb in movement. By default the item behave differently: only the next bomb you drop will be remote and then it's like you lose the item. I personally don't see the point of having one remote controlled bomb that you can't choose when you want to start using it. This item seems also useless in the beginning of the game. It also reduces the probability to get one of the other items. The original remote control item is quite unsuitable for multiplayer gameplay (you just kill basically whoever you want). I don't know how it works in competitive, I haven't tested. But if you can customize it then I would say playing a game on different rules on every game is not good for competitive.
- Taunt (a third button). You can taunt the other players during the game. This feature blocks your controls for more than a full second while your character is saying something provocative. This is a completely useless feature that has negative impact on the game play. Fortunately I think I saw a switch to turn it off. I don't know how it works in competitive.
- Not square shaped maps. One of the principle of Bomberman is to have everybody at equal distance. Rectangular maps break this rule. This can be useful for 6-players gameplay though.
- No power glove. No ability to kick bombs over blocks. Screen wrapping is so much fun in Bomberman but here I didn't see trampolines nor power gloves nor blue kangaroos that can kick a bomb at the other side of the screen.
- Choosing the player color. You can pick 2 colors and one of the 6 skins. This is very cool but you have to do it every time you start the game on a menu screen that is actually a map where you're going to move your character. Selecting the character and the number of bot there feels very awkward. I don't know how it works in competitive but you can't configure a default skin so I expect you have to do it at least one time when you start the game but I suspect you have to do it at every game. Also everybody picks their color of their choice so you may end up changing color at every game. This is not good for competitive.
Possible fixes:
- Replace remote control by mines like in Saturn Bomberman in the Jungle stage
- Enforce competitive rules if it's not already the case: pick one rule for everybody, no customization
- Enforce 2, 4 or 5 players in a map at equal distance in competitive
- Add "aura" to characters: enemies in red, allies in blue (= everybody is red except your own character)
- Customize your online skin in the configuration menu so people won't have to select it again
- Add power glove because it doesn't require a third button and it's fun
- Add trampolines
- Remove "open space" in competitive (4 walkable tiles in square). It feels awkward in a Bomberman because the bombs explodes only in the lines of the four directions of a bomb.
- Remove taunts or at least remove the time where the controls are blocked. This feature shouldn't have impact on the game
- If you're not afraid to introduce a third button, add dino's/kangaroo's abilities

The game is way too cheap ! :P
I would gladly pay 15 or 20€ for it.
Back in the day I played original Dyna Blaster on 386 CPU, and Atomic Bomberman on 486/Pentium.
I was anxiously waiting for about last 10 years when someone finally makes new Atomic Bomberman on PC since I never owned any console.
I wasn't completely happy with this game when it came out, but now it can be configured to play pretty much the same as original AB.
(Or the settings we played with back then,.. I don't remmember if it was default or not.)
I didn't like the default game settings at all.
The mounts, short rounds, item drop rates, dead players messing up the duel between me and last player...
The drop rates: There was too much of everything by default and players didn't have to think strategically to obtain items.
It's more interesting if you have for example 10 bombs without line bomb power-up and can't drop them at once, or very small reach.
Which brings me to golden flame power up. By default I seen ~5 golden flames per game.
Everyone having golden flame is not really interesting.
It's much more exciting if you can't get out of the way and don't know if the explosion will reach you or not :)
Also if you are good enough, you can just avoid the explosion because you know that it won't reach and therefore optimize your movement.
If there is less items ingame you are then forced to go after the player that has the powerup you need.
Or if you play team game, you can sacrifice yourself and drop the powerup so your friend can win the game.
I think that makes the game more interesting and strategical.
Now you can fine tune the drop rates and starting items when you create gameroom which is really awesome.
Maybe "save/load preset" funciton would be nice.
Postmortem:
There was an option enabled on online servers where dead players could spawn bombs and mess up your game.
You can now disable this when you are creating custom gameroom.
But It was anoying as hell for me. So finally I'm fighting the last player in a duel and dead players keep interfeering. wth?
Luckily this can be also configured in online game now.
If I remmember correctly I was unable to create online game with settings I like and I was unable to run dedicated server.
As most of my friends didn't like the idea of installing and running Hamachi
(or other software that allows to play LAN games over the internet) we left the game alone at that time.
Music is great and I think it fits the game perfectly.
Sound FX are ok, but the great thing is that you can easily add your own sound effects if you don't like the default ones.
Just add the sound file with same name into Splody\user\data\sounds and the game will play that one instead.
Even better, if you add more sound files for the same thing, it will play them at random so there is more variety.
I was able to convert sound files from Atomic Bomberman and use them in splody. That's the dream ! :)
My biggest problem is still the character art style and animation.
When I'm choosing the character in the beginning of the game, it's not like "which of the characters is the coolest",
but "which of the characters is bearable."
I would gladly pay money for some cool skin+animation pack/DLC.
It is possible to add custom skins/animations into the game same as the sounds but I never did any character design before.
I contacted the developer on Splody Discord server with my modding questions and he was very helpfull.
I tried to edit the default character's face to add custom one but it took long time and the result wasn't the best.
So I would still rather pay someone to make some really cool new skins.
And not even whole skins, maybe just to replace faces on each character would be enough.
The movement looks generic and same for each character, but the animation is probably more difficult to change.
It would be great if the animation changes as you pickup more speed power ups because it looks weird that the character has the same stiff movement and body angle even though the grass behind him is on fire and he just passed by Sonic the hedgehog.
Different body angle, blurry legs and fast movement lines drawn behind him would probably make all the difference.
From my experience, people are more inclined to play any game if characters are really cool.
I even sometimes play characters that suck in battle because I like how they look, talk, or behave.
The game is still being updated from time to time, so let's hope it will be even better later on.
Overall I think it's great game for the price, and very competent successor to the Atomic Bomberman.

If you love blowing up your friends in giant battles you will love this game. If you die a lot (like me) you will enjoy being able to drop bombs after you're dead to show those other players you can still cause some damage! This game tracks your stats and I keep playing just to try to keep my kills in the positive (meaning more kills than suicides) which is harder than it sounds! The avatars are really cute (catgirl ftw!) and you can make yourself unique with the cool color picker at the start of a match. I can't wait to play online with more people because that's when it gets really crazy. :D

There are very few games that support more than 4 controllers at once. Of those, this is the only one that seems to do it automatically without some kind of special setup. I was able to plug in 4 xbox one controllers, 2 of my generic SNES controllers, and an additional emulated bluetooth controller and all of them worked correctly the first try. That alone is amazing to me. I don't know what kind of wizardry the dev coded to make this work but I wish all games had this kind of controller support.
Otherwise the game itself is a pretty straight-forward bomberman clone. It is priced fairly and is a nice addition to a couch gaming collection for those times when you have a large crowd. You can go up to 64 players in one game, but the AI is much better at handling the chaos than you will and it will get old quick.
By the way, I see that the last update in the news was almost 1 year ago, but the other day I saw an update download which fixed an issue that I had with my TV. There may be more update activity than it appears. Thanks to the dev for fixing this problem!

Splody is not pretending to be anything other than a Bomberman tribute, but it plays great, has a clever character color interface, Our 4-person match was great, but apparently the servers handle up to 16...and what you do on your own custom setup is your call. Catchy music, familiar gameplay, easy to pick up and tricky to survive -- just like its inspiration. Great work.

God DAMN! this game takes me back!! just played 4 player with the wife and kids reminds me of the good ol days of bomberman on the SNES. The visuals put me off a little, but the content..... AWWWW YEH, FRANTIC, CHAOTIC MAYHEM. Immense fun for the whole family!
We have only touched the surface of the options in this game, this will keep us going for ages!

You and some friends all share a screen and race around to plant bombs, trying to trap or trick each other into getting caught in the blast range.
A fun game to play with some friends all around the screen together! Fast paced and frantic gameplay with smooth controls and good visuals. Even with lots of players all on the same screen the game's presentation is sleek, allowing me to keep my head amidst the chaos. Playing with friends online at the same time as friends in the same room as me was great.