Everything Explosive is another weird BR game. It has, as the title suggests, a heavy focus on all kinds of explosive weapons. This however also seems to be the biggest problem of the game. The gameplay in my opinion is just no fun. The explosive weapons are all to imprecise and movement doesn't feel satisfying at all. Instead, everything feels both floaty, when you jump and stiff if you don't. I liked neither gunplay nor movement and those are pretty much the most important gameplay aspects of a Battle Royale game.
The default weapons are grenades, which have a ridiculously short throwing distance. There are also some mines and all other weapons are some variations of different rocket launcher models. Furthermore cars are in the game as driveable vehicles. I haven't seen them myself, but Trailers suggest that there are even boats and helicopters in the game as well. Weapon and Vehicles can be upgraded via upgrade stations through shards, which can be collected from dead enemies (funny enough this reminds of the new upgrading system in Fortnite, which was introduced much later on).
The visuals are also rather hideous. Character models look like wooden figures and the graphics engine looks to cartoonish for my liking. This visual style was probably chosen on purpose, but I found it to be pretty off-putting.
Not everything however is bad at this game. The Battle Royale map is rather big for a smaller game and consists of multiple varied biomes and locations (there are for example desert, snow, lava and grassland parts). Something unique about Everything Explosive BR is also, that it has no shrinking map circle, but instead Death rings. Those are areas of the map, which will kill players upon entering them. They will periodicly start to spread and move to some other part of the map. This is in theory a refreshing iteration of the BR formula. In practise it also leads to frustratingly long searches for the last players in a match. Something I really disliked was the fact, that every couple of minutes there would be a gigantic ingame message being placed across the screen making it nearly impossible to see anything happening in the match.
A strength of the game is its variety of different game modes. BR can be played in Solo, Duo or Squad matches. There is usually also a special BR mode in rotation (Currently it is 'Overpowered', which grants OP weapons). Aside from this there are modes like Boss Battle (as the name suggests a Boss Fight mode), Castle Defense (Defending a base), Bomb Blowup (Deathmatch inspired mode), Ducks (No longer in the game), Capture the Frag (like Capture the Flag) and Target Practise (1 vs 1 competition on shooting target disks). Apart from BR I could only get a match in Boss Battle going, since the other modes require real players and there aren't any of those in Everything Explosive.
The first few months after the initial release of the game in June 2020 Everything Explosive has received continuous updates to improve and extend the game (the last update however was in December 2020). The game was developed by a single person, who also implemented a pretty cool Live Event into the game in August 2020. The Live Event was heavily inspired by the 'End Event' and the 'Device Event' of Fortnite Battle Royale. Nonetheless the Everything Explosive event looked pretty cool and spectacular. I also don't know of any other smaller BR game that even attempted something like this. So I found this to be pretty impressive.
There is also an itemshop in the game. I have to say that I didn't really care about this in such a small game without any playerbase (all time peak seems to be 5 players and in the last months player numbers varied between 0 and 1). Players could theoretically purchase ingame currency and unlock skins and other cosmetic items. There are also weekly challenges for owners of the Gift Pack, which is something like the games Battle Pass.
Settings in Everything Explosive have only a small level of customizability. Apart from gameplay and menu sound volume, only the general visual quality can be switched. Controls for example are not customizable at all. For a game, that offers that many game modes, itemshop elements etc. this is a bit disappointing.
As I have already mentioned, there is no playerbase left in this game. The chances of queuing up with a random player are close to none. Since I personally didn't enjoy this game very much I can understand that. You could obviously invite friends to play the game with you, but the gameplay is in my opinion too flawed to do so. It is still a shame, if you consider that the one person developer actually showed a lot of talent. The variety of different game modes aside from BR, the implementation of a Live Event or the Trailers show that he could probably do some pretty cool things on a different game or within a development team. Everything Explosive however suffers from a boring gameplay, that holds the game back immensely and ultimately made my playing experience rather unfun.
3,5/10
