I suck at Bomberman. I just can’t do it. I know how to play the game, I know what to look out for, I even know a few strategies, but I’m just awfully bad at the game itself. Maybe my reflexes can’t handle it. Maybe my brain just can’t cope with looking in four directions at once. Maybe my conscience subconsciously objects to blowing super-deformed people up for no particular reason. I don’t know, but it’s a curse that has afflicted me since the NES version. Leave me alone unsupervised in a Bomberman level for three minutes and not only will I blast my way through all of my own lives, but I’ll probably find a way to toss a bomb over into one of the other games in my collection and blow the saved games to bits. It doesn’t stop me from coming back though, over and over again, like some sort of slow-moving sadist.
The addictive nature of the core Bomberman experience has been instrumental in leading Hudson Soft to believe that the public want to consume Bomberman as a franchise. Games of all types brandishing the Bomberman logo have been vomited over all types of platforms – there have been sports sims, RPGs, platformers, everything you can imagine. I think what they have to realise though is that Bomberman, as a mascot, is not loveable. Heck, he isn’t anything, and all people want him to do is walk around a square arena, dropping bombs and then running away. We don’t want him to play volleyball. We don’t want him to ride a kangaroo.
So, when I took a look at Bomberman Land Touch!, the first volume in the Land series to hit the Nintendo DS as well as Europe itself, you can probably guess how I reacted to the idea of an adventure game involving the player navigating Bomberman around a theme park. Luckily though, Hudson Soft have backed up this idea by bundling “the definitive multiplayer” Bomberman experience with it. Two games in one? More than that. The main adventure offers over 30 mini-games, while the multiplayer version throws at you all the variations and alterations of the traditional Bomberman theme you can imagine. On paper, it’s an impressive package, but how does it weigh up on the screen? I don’t know. Why don’t you read this review and find out?
It seems like the fashionable thing to do these days is to make games that are little more than a compendium of light-hearted mini-games. It reminds me of the old days, when licenses like Terminator II and Batman had a different type of game for each level – first there was a platformer, then a one-on-one beat ‘em up, then a driving game, a puzzle game… Basically, a desperate attempt to make a good game out of a weak idea. Something out of nothing. In this particular example, the backstory is so uninteresting and bizarre that you can’t help but think that the creators were just desperate for a shell to house all of their mini-games. Here it is. Your character, Cheerful White (that's the generic white Bomberman), has been kidnapped, right, by his friends, right, to celebrate his fattest friend’s birthday on a luxury theme park island. Okay. Your job is to make him the pirate king of the island, by exploring it all and winning at all of the attractions. Okay.
The theme park rides are, of course, the mini-games. The majority of the theme park is closed off to start with, but if you prove to be good at the games and earn enough tokens, you can unlock the gates that lead to the rest of the fun. Seriously, this theme park would never make any money. Most of your time on here will be spent exploring the four zones (Spade, Heart, Club and, you guessed it, Diamond) trying to work out what gates you can now unlock. This becomes incredibly frustrating as it’s remarkably difficult to work out what you should be doing at any one time. There are so many sub-quests going on, so many gates to unlock and items to find, that you may get bogged down before you even start.
All of this would be worthwhile if the mini-games were great. But they’re not. They’re good - most of them - but not wet-yourself good. There’s a nice variety of ideas on display here, with the game styles mixing it up from strategic to reflex-based, from bowling all the way through to racing on top of giant bombs. The majority of them are fun for a quick blast (sorry), but you probably won’t want to take the game up on its offer to play them outside of the main adventure. With the mini-games, you’re more than likely to find half of them simplistic and not worth the hassle, while the other half have a soul-destroying level of difficulty that comes out of nowhere and smacks you upside your frustrated head. I think I found three games that I really liked (I can’t remember their pun-tastic names, but they involved sprinting, the bomb toss and blowing up annoying little pirate freaks), and probably three times that amount that drove me absolutely crazy.
Eventually, I gave up on the main game, which is rare for me to do. I just didn’t want to handle the increasing frustration, not from something I was supposed to be enjoying. If your idea of a fun game is wandering around a confusing map, desperately trying to do everything you can to make any sort of progress, stopping only to play an annoying mini-game, then you’ll really, really like this.
Luckily though, it’s not all bad. Coming to the rescue is the Bomb Mode, a comprehensive version of the original Bomberman game. Throwing aside the touchscreen in favour of good ol’ buttons, the only aspect of the DS that it utilises is the dual screen – yep, that’s right, the gaming area spreads over two screens, meaning up to eight scrappers can battle it out. You can play this alone or with friends. There’s a massive selection of interesting games to play here – you can choose a grid with no blocks, a ‘Zombie’ level where nobody ever dies, an arena where the bombers battle it out for territory. Of course, the bomb-cherry on the bomb-cake is that all of this can be done with one copy of the game between eight people, with no restrictions at all. An excellent multiplayer experience.
The mini-games can also be played with friends in Attraction Mode, but they are very short and the game needs to be reset every time you want to change the game. That’s not cool, Hudson Soft, and it turns a below average gaming experience into a terrible one.
It’s hard to determine whether or not I should recommend this, as the quality is so split between the two games. If you have a few friends with DS consoles, then you could do worse than buying a copy of this to share between you. But only for the multiplayer. As for the single player game? Go back to the beginning of this review and read it again. This time round, try counting how many times the word ‘bomb’ appears. Now add it up. What you just did there is more fun than the single player game.