There was once a gamer who, at the ripe old age of 26, decided he had better things to do in life than sit in front of intentionally bastard-hard video games and get frustrated over and over again. This same fellow had to spend a few weeks casually playing Solitaire on his laptop to mend the damage done by constantly failing at Mega Man 9. He had to spend a few hours doing yoga to erase the memories of Ninja Gaiden 2. This man was at the end of his tether.

Earlier this week whilst casually browsing the new releases on XBA, he came across ‘Splosion Man and, tempted by the glowing colours and whacky nature, downloaded it. A few days later he had, through crawled through fire and brimstone to complete it; through hissy fits, through moments where he felt the need to turn the ***king console off because the coc**ng game was too bloody hard. Through day, through night, through aching hands and blistered thumbs. But, and this remains the main point: he made it.

This person was rather obviously me, and equally obviously you are no doubt curious as to what kept me going. ‘Splosion Man is, at times, as frustrating, as unfair, as downright rage inducing as anything you’re ever likely to play. It’s relentlessly punishing at pretty much every turn, it requires entire minutes' worth of precision jumping more than a dozen times, and you will often have to die a handful of times to work out what the heck you are supposed to be doing on any given section. It sounds like the recipe for high blood pressure.

Yet… it’s great fun, and offers a pretty enormous sense of satisfaction. The game is a pretty standard two-dimensional platform puzzle title save for the fact that, rather than being able to jump, you detonate the flaming lead character to propel him around. You can chain up to three detonations together to basically double jump your way around, but once those three have been used your little fella is reduced to a burnt-out husk who needs to recharge by touching walls or floor for a short period of time.

This, obviously, lends itself to all sorts of puzzling challenges. Thankfully you can wall jump around the place and this solves a good deal of puzzles, but you’re also going to find yourself having to time explosions with your character passing over barrels to propel him far enough, having to explode to propel projectiles back at an enemy and on occasion having to play tennis with a barrel to explode a scientist who’s guarding a switch you need turned off.

The game kicks off nicely enough and introduces a couple of new ideas and play styles pretty quickly, but perhaps one thing you could say against ‘Splosion Man is that after about thirty minutes you will have pretty much seen and done everything you will be needing to do in the game, although in latter levels the timing and execution for each is obviously going to be far, far more key.

Much more commendable is the level design, which although not jam-packed full of winners has enough golden nuggets lodged in its fifty portions to make you want to keep ploughing through. One particular favourite of mine was a level at the start of the third world that basically boiled down to a 2-minute wall jump festival against an ever-rising platform of spikes, and as you can see right here it’s edge-of-the-seat stuff.

The game also offers a couple of features to keep you hunting around and playing long-term, whether it be the hidden cake in each level to the multiplayer co-op mode that is (sorry about this) a blast. Upon completing the game once you’re even offered an extra-hard one-shot-kills mode to grind your way through with teeth gritted and hands locked into sweating claws. Added together with the live leaderboards that show you how your score and times compare against everyone else (bloody badly, as it turns out) and a time trial mode where you can pick your favourite levels again and again to practice and you’ve got a pretty neat package for the 800 Microsoft Points it costs.

It’s a curious one really. Looking back at my time with the game, half of it was spent with the controller flying out of my hands, expletives flowing from my mouth and my blood pressure creeping upward. Despite all this, the level design was occasionally bordering on genius, the cartoon visuals and slapstick humour nature (your enemies explode into meat products for instance) was amusing enough and once you did manage to drag your tattered, aching hands and brain through a level you felt like the king of the world… until the next one started and kicked your arse all over again. In essence, this is I suppose what 2D platformers have always been about, and as such I can’t help but give it the thumbs-up.

Well, if I could actually physically do that, of course.