I missed Boulder Dash’s original release, so being assigned to review a new game based on it left me scrambling to find the 1984 version (or any version, really) in order to know what has been changed or updated. While I only got to spend a few minutes with these older versions, it was enough to understand that both the originals and Boulder Dash-XL are puzzle games based on digging through caves. The player’s character searches through tunnels to acquire gems and find the exit, repeating this process for several stages; there isn’t much of a plot, very little in the way of cutscenes, it’s just about solving puzzles. Boulder Dash-XL adds some modern twists on this formula, but it manages to be generally faithful to the series’ core ideas and is pretty fun.
Boulder Dash XL is played from a 2D perspective, letting you guide your character up, down, left, and right while tunneling through various caves. While your primary goal is to gather gems and then make your way to the exit, two things will get in your way: perilous terrain, and various enemies. While Boulder Dash isn’t realistic, it is consistent; if you leave loose boulders stacked against one another or leave nothing beneath them, they will roll around and try to fall on you... which is about as instantly fatal as you would imagine "a rock bigger than you are just dropped down" to be. Enemies also leave various traps of their own and patrol certain routes, and while not all of them are immediately lethal, they’re all dangerous enough. This leaves players juggling four concerns: finding the gems and exit, doing it within the time limit, avoiding enemies or luring them into your own traps, and avoiding cave-ins from unsupported terrain that can make it impossible to finish the stage.
Thankfully, all of these concepts are as simple and easy to learn as the controls. The left analog stick moves your character, the A button lets you dig and grab items without actually stepping into their part of the map (this is vital for certain puzzles), RB lets you look around the whole level so as to plan ahead, and the right stick uses some basic power-ups such as a telescoping arm used to grab particularly heavy items you couldn’t otherwise move. Learning the controls only takes a few minutes, placing the real emphasis on understanding how terrain, traps, and enemies behave since some stages will require you to know the exact sequence of moves to make. Thankfully, learning these rules isn’t too hard in the first place and most stages are loose enough to allow you to figure out your own solution that is only generally in line with what the level designers wanted you to do. Outside of other Boulder Dash games, a close comparison might be Dig Dug with less emphasis on fighting and more on figuring out ’tunneling puzzles’; it’s not an exact description, but it’s not far off.
While stages start as very simple puzzles, additional levels gradually add new ideas. It never becomes an outright complex game, but what starts as simple tunneling with the occasional mild power-up thrown in eventually adds things like one-way doors, teleporters, and more. My experience with previous games in the series is very limited, so I’m not certain how many of these are new concepts to the series, but most of these gimmicks are used well and make later levels enjoyable. In addition to roughly a hundred such levels, there are also several that are explicitly called Puzzle Mode stages where you have no time limit but must instead pick the precise series of moves needed to win. An additional set of ’Retro Mode’ levels mimic the look and rules of older Boulder Dash games, and are meant to be notably more challenging peers to the normal stages.
This is a very straight-forward game, which is its primary strength but also a bit of a weakness. Even though later stages do throw in new ideas to keep things fresh, the core experience of tunneling, grabbing gems, and avoiding death at the hands of enemies or cave-ins does eventually suffer from some repetition. The other noteworthy problem is that Boulder Dash-XL lacks a level editor, something that has been present in other entries in the series and even included in some fan-made games based on Boulder Dash. This is a very strange thing to leave out, though the batch of levels you do get in XL are generally good ones.
Despite those problems, Boulder Dash-XL is a good puzzle game that calls for strong planning alongside good timing and occasionally quick reflexes. It seems to remain faithful to the core ideas of the series, and while each stage can be completed in just a few minutes you get enough of them to justify the $10 USD/800 Microsoft Point price. With this in mind, I think fans of the series will be pleased so long as they’re willing to tolerate the lack of a level editor and newcomers that otherwise enjoy puzzle games of this sort will probably find plenty to like as well. While there are superior choices for this genre on Xbox Live Arcade, if you have already played them then this is a genuinely good, enjoyable choice and worth picking up.
