Review by Jabberwock May 23, 2009

RDX - Rectangular Demolition eXplosive is a puzzle-platformer that is nicely polished and nicely designed, but it has a few significant flaws.

In it you play as a bomb that can blow up the stuff around it, and is trying to find a way to blow up a goal object, for reasons unknown (it's made more unfathomable by the fact that the object you're destroying is randomized and is generally a piece of trash or something... it seems to me that maybe the authors were just finding a use for some old pixel art or something). There are two main challenges - one, finding a path to the goal, and two, not getting doused with water in the process.

The level design is mostly quite good, and the puzzles are challenging and require thought, but that latter point - the water - is where things get sticky. For such an integral part of the gameplay, it's not very well programmed, and even toward the end of the game it still seemed to me to be sort of a crapshoot how it would behave. I'd explain to you exactly its weirdness, but honestly I don't understand it well enough even for that. But fortunately, this is not quite a big enough thing to ruin the game, which is otherwise quite good.

The graphics are polished, and the menus make it look like a pretty professional project. The save and level selection system is good, and the programming is mostly well done - except for the jumping, and the aforementioned water problem. There are only a couple real sound effects - a clicking on the menu, an explosion, and some odd maniacal laughter whenever you win a level - and a single track of repetitive, pump-up type MIDI music, which works okay, I guess, though I turned it off.

This is not an exceptional game, but it is certainly the product of obvious hard work, and the puzzle design is such that I ended up playing it longer than I expected. It's above average, at least, and if puzzles grab you, you'll probably like it.