I originally wanted to play this before Braveland, but it got stuck on the loading screen. It had an update queued the next day, so I figured I’d try it again: nothing. I posted about it in the Steam forum: nothing. I went to their website and sent an e-mail to the listed address: nothing. It wasn’t until a few days ago, when the devs made a post asking if anyone wanted to take over the project, that I was able to get a response: said post listed an e-mail different than the one on their website, so I reported the bug to that e-mail, and it was fixed the next day.
But then I played the game.
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Blast Zone! Tournament
8 hours playtime
2 of 45 achievements
This is a Bomberman clone. Each board is a square grid, filled with destructible blocks, indestructible blocks, enemies, and of course, empty tiles you can walk across. Your main (and only, to be honest) method of attack is to lay a bomb down, which explodes in a + shape after 2-3 seconds (it never turns or goes diagonally). Power-ups will also spawn in the level, either randomly when you blow up a destructible block or if opponents blows up and lose all their power-ups (in which case, they get scattered across the arena). These can increase the number of bombs you can lay down (starts at 1 by default), how many tiles away the explosion stretches (again, starts at 1 by default and only in the + shape), or how fast you move (starts at 4 by default). For the single player campaign, there are 4 worlds, and each world has 60 levels; the 20 in the first column are part of the main campaign, and the two columns to the right contain harder levels with the same objective as the level to their left.
As someone who beat Super Bomberman 1 and 2, Bomberman 94, Saturn Bomberman, and Bomberman Tournament, I felt the PvE battles where you have to face another Bomberperson were the weakest parts of the games*: all either of you can do is lay bombs and wait, and unless one of you gets trapped, it’s really easy simply to walk out of the bombs’ range, so on top of being slow and tedious, they never really play out any differently. So naturally, this game has those battles take up half of the single player mode, though you have to face multiple opponents at once (usually 3-5, but every 20 levels, it’s 9 at once). What else can I say but “they really drive home how repetitive PvE Bomberman is”? There isn’t even a way to know the range of any opponent’s bomb before it explodes (at least, not in single player), so the only way to be sure you’re safe is to make the same diagonal retreat each time. Needless to say, I didn’t do any of the harder PvE levels, and I gave up on the regular final level (at the end of world 4) because 9 opponents with nowhere to trap them is just too chaotic and random for me.
There are two other types of PvE matches besides elimination, though. The first introduced is where you have to collect a certain number of coins before making it to the center of the board. At first, it seems like it could be interesting: rather than having to attack your opponents, you simply need to avoid their attacks. Unfortunately, this is a direct translation of the PvP version, which means your AI opponents can collect coins, too (even if they’re not programmed to go after them), and the only way to get those coins back on the field is to kill them. Thing is, nobody stays dead in this mode; dying has you revive after a few seconds, so if you kill one, another could get the coin before you, and then you kill the other one only to see the previous one get the coin back, etc. Oh, and you can’t see which opponents have coins, either (you’d only know if you see them collect one).
The second is where your explosion paints the ground in your team’s color, and the team with the most tiles covered when time runs out wins. If your team’s bomb(s) and another team’s bomb(s) are in range of each other, the affiliation of the first explosion is what determines the color all the bombs paint. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of this mode, either: after everyone’s powered up, its too easy and quick for both teams to flip the board back in their favor by chaining multiple large-explosion bombs in enemy territory, so rather than being much about skill, it’s whoever just so happened to have the majority when time runs out.
Ah, but there’s still the other half of single player! And it’s actually what I expected from a single player Bomberman clone: enemies that aren’t just copies of you, combined with levels actually designed around the new enemies (in other words, obstacle courses instead of PvP arenas)! Alas, this also has problems. The game claims that it has “puzzles,” but they’re literally nothing more than trial-and-error: red/blue switches will swap certain tiles for certain other tiles, but you never know which tiles will change or to what they’ll change until after you blow up the switch (and even then, nothing will happen if you happen to be standing on a tile that would’ve changed). Some levels require you to step on a flashing tile, which will spawn another flashing tile somewhere else in the level, and of course, you won’t know where until after you step on it (and if you step on a previous flashing tile instead of the next one, they all disappear, but the game never tells you this). There are also tiles that have an arrow on them; these will launch you in the air in the direction they’re pointing, but the number of tiles you’ll be thrown is different for every one, so the only way to know for sure is to activate it, but then you may not be able to get back easily, of course. There are also glowing white circles that will teleport you to another glowing white circle (or sometimes, you’ll even be sent to a tile that doesn’t have a glowing white circle on it, just in case the game was being too consistent for you); needless to say, you won’t know where you’ll be sent until after you go in. Honestly, while it may not technically be half of the non-PvE levels that rely exclusively on trial-and-error, it sure feels like it (I lost count of how many there are). I even gave up one of the third-tier difficulty levels in world 4 because it was nothing but trial and error: the red/blue switches changed what launch arrows were on the board, and when I finally got to the end, I realized it was a “walk over the yellow tiles” level, which meant I’d have to memorize five different setups and the order to do them in, all without any way to figure it out except trial and error. This just reinforces my belief that a significantly large group of people (who are all devs) don’t actually know what a puzzle is.
So, are we at the good part yet? Not quite; while we have weeded out the worst of the worst, the action stages have some issues, too. For one, the camera is at an angle looking down, so anything one tile above anything tall (like an indestructible block, or yourself) can be obscured and hard to notice. This goes double when what’s above you is a cracked tile that turns into a hole when a bomb explodes on it:
Another example of bad graphics: the arena border always uses literally the exact same texture as regular empty tiles! That messed me up a couple times.
Beyond those objectively bad graphics (and some other instances where I feel enemies and openings could be more visually distinct from empty tiles), some enemies have inconsistent AI, notably the rat-bots and grasshopper-bots: instead of being able to glance at an enemy and instantly know “okay, that enemy will move like that so I can counter like this,” you’ll need to stop and watch its movements until you see it repeat itself, and if that level has a time limit, that basically means you’ll have to lose before you have a chance. Again with the trial-and-error!
Speaking of the time limit, it can sometimes be really strict, and when the game also makes you fight enemies and also doesn’t give you any +1 bomb power-ups, you HAVE to wait for your first bomb to explode before you can attack again, which means you’ll need to have really good timing (especially since, again, bombs take a full 2-3 seconds to explode). EDIT: Okay, it turns out that if you’re holding a bomb with the “pick up and throw” power-up, that’ll prevent the bomb from exploding, so if you grab it right before it explodes, you won’t have to worry about blowing yourself up or the enemy escaping its explosion despite being stunned after you hit it with the bomb. Of course, the game doesn’t tell you this, and there still isn’t much room for error on those two hardest-tier world 1 levels.
So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this game. What small percentage of the single player is actually fun is marred by everything else, and even if you like PvP Bomberman, keep in mind that the game requires an online server connection just to boot up (even if you just want single player or local multiplayer), and the devs are currently looking for someone else to take over. In other words, it may not be playable for much longer.
*Excluding those stupid luck-based Karabon battles from Bomberman Tournament. The only thing worse than trial-and-error-memorization is percent-chances.