This is a bit of an oddball one for me – Dynomite! Deluxe is a game from my childhood, however the Steam version is not. Which means I’m here to present you a sort of half-and-half thing – a review of the Steam version of Dynomite! Deluxe, and my Childhood Throwback of Dynomite! Deluxe.
Perhaps it’s just my memory being bad (which is likely), but I don’t remember some of the annoyances that I’ve seen in the Steam release. Well, annoyance. Every time you launch the game it forgets the options you had set and reverts back to full screen and resets any volume changes. And of course since this IS an older game… the resolution in full screen is absolutely awful. Which means every time you boot it you need to switch to windowed… yeah, gets annoying after awhile. Other old Pop Cap games released on Steam don’t do this, at least not the ones I’ve played. Other than the whole full screen issue, the game is exactly like how it was before. Oh, I guess you also can’t take Steam screenshots in-game but… eh. That’s not THAT important really.
Dynomite! Deluxe is one of many old Pop Cap games from my Childhood. Hey, when you’re poor you have to do what you have to do! No but really, these games are amazingly addictive. The whole point of the game is match 3 (or more) eggs together to clear the board. You have to shoot them from the bottom to make your match. There are power ups you can get sometimes which can do things such as increase your score when you make a match or give you a shot guide.
There’s four modes available to play in Dynomite! Deluxe – Endless, Stomped, Fossil, and Time Trial. Endless isn’t really “endless” in the sense you can’t lose… It’s just an “endless” stream of eggs. Time Trial is just seeing how far you can get in whatever time with no risk of losing. Yeah, those names do feel slightly reversed to me… but maybe it really is just me.
In Stomped you need to clear out each “puzzle” before the eggs get stomped to the bottom by the mad mommy. You need to aim your shots right to make your matches, though of course sometimes you’ll just get screwed by randomness and be unable to make a match for awhile. This is a nice challenge to see just how far you can get, though I typically start to fail somewhere around level 11-15…
In Fossil, your goal is to free the piece of a fossil before the eggs (or fossil) reach the bottom. Like in Stomped, you’ll need to aim your shots right and you can just get screwed by randomness. Unlike in Stomped, there isn’t an “end” to the eggs that will come out and you can sometimes make off-screen matches.
Dynomite! Deluxe is definitely still as addictive today as it was when I was younger. That said, the Steam version isn’t exactly that… great. It’d be nice if it actually remembered the options I had set. It remembers leaderboard names so why can’t it remember my option settings! Still, I don’t regret playing it again (considering it’s been on my Steam game list for awhile now) just to relive that piece of my childhood.
Dynomite! Deluxe Steam Review Score
1/5
I don’t want to have to reset my settings every single time I launch it! The game itself is otherwise okay, it’s just how the Steam release was handled.
