Sanuk Games have a stab at recreating the genre of one of gaming’s lost icons, but the passion just isn’t there leaving a drab package.
| Developer | Sanuk Games |
| Publisher | Sanuk Games |
| Franchise | N/A |
| Genre | Puzzle |
| PSTV | No |
| Physical English | No |
World-building & Story
Bombing Busters pits you as a robot built by a mad scientist aiming to use you to take over the world, apparently by making your way through a series of Bomberman-esque arenas and blowing up every creature that stands in your way.
Clearly, the game’s plot is a framing device used as an excuse to build a puzzle-bomber – it’s not important nor is it ever presented as such, instead being background noise while you dive into the gameplay. There are some nice touches such as amusing loading screens (“to make the game load faster, mash all the buttons”), but otherwise the world of Bombing Busters is fairly passive.
Presentation & Sound
If you told me that Bombing Busters was a mobile title, I’d believe you. It has that standard mix of bright colours; cartoon-y characters; soft features and touch-screen menus that you’d come to expect. That’s not a bad thing and the game certainly isn’t ugly, but there’s precious little that feels memorable or unique about it.
So you’ll make your way through a series of vibrant mazes set in varying environments (forests; ice caverns etc.) as a little robot, often coming across different native creatures from acid-splitting plants to snails and critters. It all looks fine – animations like the bomb explosions or little snowstorms that appear are easy enough to spot and the character models are all fairly cute if a little lacking in detail.
The problem comes after half an hour or so of playing when you’ll realise everything just looks so… bland. Take the environments which do pop with colour, but feature the same repeated objects over and over such as grassy bushes or snow mounds that can be blown up to reveal an often confusing set of power ups that you’ll have already forgotten the function of. Nothing in the art direction or execution has anything particularly special about it, everything just feels “average”.
Even the soundtrack suffers from this, featuring a variety of public domain tracks that are repeated ad-nauseum until you’re sick of hearing them. There is voice acting from the professor here who turns in a decent if over-exaggerated performance, but otherwise sound definitely isn’t one of the title’s strong suits.
Gameplay & Content
A Bomberman clone through and through, Bombing Busters does feature adaptive gameplay that gets more challenging the more your progress, but its randomly generated nature leaves the final product far more frustrating than enjoyable.
If you’re unfamiliar with Bomberman, you move around a series of grid-based mazes in a real-time manner and can place bombs, which are used to clear a path to new areas. These bombs are also used to beat enemies by catching them in the blast radius, which can be difficult given that the majority will actively seek cover – effectively turning the gameplay into a puzzler as you attempt to figure out the best way to trap your foe.
Along the way you’ll collect a range of power ups that have various effects – you’ll gain the ability to plant more than one bomb; increase your bombs’ blast radius; pick up and throw bombs etc. As such, you’ll slowly have to get to grips with more and more mechanics which – alongside different enemy types introduced with each new set of levels – means the game can get overwhelmingly difficult quite quickly.
Effectively, Bombing Busters challenges how far in advance you can plan things – if you mistakenly blow up a barrier which gives a powerful enemy access to the part of the maze you’re in, you may as well restart because there’s very little opportunity to come back from this. Assessing the situation and making a plan is clearly a key feature then, but each level’s time limit of five minutes completely discourages this which is bizarre.
Making things worse is the power-up system – the icons are so nondescript and forgettable that you’ll often gather them without fully realising what they do which will then cause havoc with your planning. You’ll rapidly be setting off chain reactions across large parts of the map but you’ll never really get used to quite how they’re going to go down as you collect more and more tokens (due to some making your blast radius much bigger; others triggering environmental effects), leading to frustrating restarts due to a small slip-up.
And really, “frustrating” is how I’d describe my time with Bombing Busters. The first few levels are minor fun, but the difficulty ramps up so rapidly that I found myself discouraged to keep playing and with a lack of other modes to mess around with (aside from empty online battles that I’m told suffer from matchmaking issues), my interest quickly waned. Combined with the generic presentation and absent story there’s not really much to recommend here – if you’re in desperate need of a Bomberman game it might be worth a shot but even then you’d be better served with one of the backwards-compatible PSP or PS1 entries that at least offered a bit of life in their world.
Conclusion
A clone that is inferior in almost every way to the product that is being aped, Bombing Busters is soul-less and forgettable puzzler. The solid use of colour can’t disguise its Unity roots while the gameplay rapidly becomes annoyingly difficult despite a few flourishes of fun, leaving a disappointing final product.
4.0/10
kresnik258gaming 