hakuna matata: Bombshell PC Review

Playing Bombshell immediately felt like a mix of good and bad. From the get go you are met with a somewhat unique artistic style that comprises of both violence and comic inspired graphics. Getting into the game, you clearly see why someone would immediately think of a Scifi-Diablo from the graphical presentation and the top-down perspective - in combination with the quests and character development parts. However, this comparison only last only you run into combat (which luckily doesn't take long) and you are instantly reminded that this is first and foremost a shooter - with a little RPG sugar added on top.

This game is about the weapons and about blowing stuff up: Enemies, Structures and occasionally Shelly (unfortunately you cannot blow up the GDF forces even though you often feel a burning desire to do so when you hear certain voice-actor's lack of talent throughout the game). Throwing Bowling Bombs feels awesome and upgraded to Hive Bombs is a serious blast (punintended).

The Gameplay is somewhat fluent even though it often caters to hit and run tactics rather than strategic skills in attack. Over time it does become both repetitive and shows lack of variety on both gameplay, enemies and their tactics. Furthermore, the top-down and somewhat zoomed-in view comes with a few issues. Downward jumping is really a leap of faith and most of the time you kill enemies before you see them if you watch the radar. For the most part of the game, I played "Kill the Red Dots" and saw few enemies (only when swamped from a spawning lot or a mini-boss). Come to think of it perhaps that was why I never saw much variation of enemies?

The worst part, however, is clearly the one-liners from Shelly. They will drive you mad and constantly makes you want to turn Shelly's weapons against herself and get it over with.

The levels are great from a visual perspective and matches the artistic style of the game, though they often remind you more of a dungeon crawler than that of a galactic interplanetary explorer. Haskell Challenges adds a nice break now and then and is a good addition to linearity of the level designs.

The music is seriously awesome and some of the best and most varied game music I have experienced in a while. Not quite up there with Skyrim, but in my ears a close match with Deus Ex. The guitar play in some of these pieces is crazy good and the main reason for buying the Digital Deluxe-version. This soundtrack is the bomb (no pun intended).

The Quest really lack depths and you feel no engagement or commitment to any of the other characters whatsoever. Admittedly, the Amiga angle had potential with the internal battle between human and machine / Power and Compassion, but it never really reaches that level. Combined with the 90'ies humor spread widely across the game design it is difficult to know whether this game wants to be a serious one with a story to match or just "Duke-The-Fun-Out-Of-It". Still the Gameplay holds up for the most of a couple of hours of gaming before repetitiveness requires a break.

It runs okay - especially compared to when ROTT was initially released, but there is still a lot of bugs in this game and one can only hope that it will get some much-needed attention in this area in the coming days and weeks. There were performance issues when encountering the big boss fights which were quite an issue (Don't get me started on how bad the battle against the Abomination Boss is and ridicously hard compared to the balance of all the levels leading up to it!). At the same time, you didn't really feel that the Boss fights were memorable moments and this is something this game seriously lacks. Those memorable moments where you feel both challenged and skillful enough to just make it (anyone remembers their first encounter with The Butcher in Diablo and this is something each game should have, in my opinion).

One thing really missing from this game is COOP, which would really shine in this weapon- and violence focused trip down interplanetary dungeons with a friend.

Overall the game is quite fun, has solid gameplay even though it becomes repetitive after a while and lacks variety in many aspects. It also had potential for so much more. I mean when you see so many trying to compare it to Diablo (which isn't really fair in any way you choose to compare it) it shows that there is a market for a Deep Character and Story-driven Sci-fi Diablo (perhaps the perfect marriage between StarCraft and Diablo? ... An enticing idea for Blizzard right there!).

Bombshell shows what a small team can do, but also what a small team is limited to. Would I recommend it? The price is a bit high when you compare it to what else you get for the same amount, but it is a small diamond - even though it is rough in many places. Let Interceptor hone it a bit more and I think I'll be a nice addition to most shooter-crazy people with a tendency to classical 3D Realms-based violence and weaponry. Add COOP and a small price discount and you have a must-try recipe for mayhem on a galactic scale!

Minimum Requirements of Bombshell:

OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1, Win 10 (64-bit Operating System Required)

Processor: Intel Core i5-750, 2.67 GHz | AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 (2 GB Memory Minimum) | AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2 GB Memory Minimum)

DirectX: Version 9.0c

Storage: 10 GB available space

Recommended requirements of Bombshell:

OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1, Win 10 (64-bit Operating System Required)

Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz

Memory: 6 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 - 3 GB Memory Recommended | AMD Radeon HD 7950 - 3 GB Memory Recommended