Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL

This was the next requested game of the three I didn’t own and while I think it was better than Looney Toons it’s not great by any means.

The story mainly revolves around Dexter as he travels through universes assembling a team of Cartoon Network characters to fight the ultimate evil and save all worlds. The ultimate evil is a remote control. Which I suppose can commit the ultimate evil of changing the channel away from Cartoon Network.

I must admit, there was some nostalgia here. When I was little, I used to watch Johnny Bravo, Captain Planet and Dexter’s Lab (sometimes the Powerpuff Girls) but some of these other ones I had never even heard of. Who the fuck is Chowder and why does he have to continually belch? I don’t get it. But I also didn’t get Cow and Chicken either and they didn’t make the cut, thank God.

The gameplay is like Super Smash Brothers in that you have two attacks and boss battles turn into a clusterfuck where it’s impossible to know what’s happening half the time. When you are not in a boss battle, it’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up although it’s generous to call it a beat ‘em up when there are only two moves you can do. The health system doesn’t make a lot of sense either. When I was playing on hard it looked like my player character could take up to 300% of damage? What’s the point in this? Why not just have a health bar like normal beat ‘em up games? It just adds to the obscurity of not knowing what’s going on.

The controls caused me a bit of an issue too. Apparently, the jump button, which is required for the side scrolling and is very important for staying alive during boss fights, defaults to the Y button. This game doesn’t pre-date standardised controls so why the fuck isn’t it the A button like every other game?

It’s based on Cartoon Network cartoon characters so it’s predictable as to what I’m going to say about the music and graphics. The music is repetitive and irritating. I think I may actually play Skyrim again just so I’ve got something nice to say about music. The graphics are as you would expect from a cartoon-based environment although some of the likenesses were good – Captain Planet aside.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The first thing I did before tackling this game was check for missables and difficulty specific achievements. There are no missables but there is an achievement for playing the game through on hard. This is one of the worse parts of the achievement hunt, not because it’s hard but the game is so boring, I struggled to play it for more than an hour at a time. If you do play the story through on hard, you will net 11 achievements. In reality it’s 13 achievements as you should get the score related ones from doing this.

The next thing I did was clear up all the things you need to do in story mode. There are a few speed run achievements but none of these are particularly troubling, with the exception of SECTOR V which requires you to complete one of the longer levels in under 5 minutes. Basically, this is trial and error so you have to do several runs to work out when you need to race through and when you need to be careful on the platforms.

There are also achievements for doing certain fights without dying. One of these fights is against a character called Aku and it was a total pain as it seemed like luck as to whether one of his attacks blew you off the map or not. This took me several attempts before I lucked out and finished it.

After this, its case of using battle mode to get all the other achievements by using two or three controllers and getting PTE finishes and assists with specific characters. The one exception to this is getting three knockouts at the same time with Captain Planet’s special attack but this is easily done in one of the end levels.

You also need to spend your points to unlock the stages, characters and alternate costumes, some of which you will need for the achievements in battle mode. This is a small grind but less painful that playing through story mode.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is an easy completion but it seriously lacks in the fun department. I wouldn’t recommend playing this one either. There are much better games out there. Even Gamerscore wise, I don’t think it’s worth it.