Bombslinger (Early-Access Review)
Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £8.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Version Reviewed: Update 13 (Aug 14th-Time of writing)
Other Reviews: Release
Normally, for a game review, I try to avoid referring to a game in terms of other games. With Bombslinger, its influences are so very clear that this becomes somewhat counterproductive. And those influences can boil down to two games, and one film genre: Bomberman, Binding of Isaac, and Spaghetti Westerns.
A shop, potentially for buying upgrades, piles of ashes where the simpler enemies once stood, the more challenging enemies are still around, and a super-bomb barrel that I could potentially use. Yup, this helps sum up that mixture of elements!
You are an outlaw who settled down, then had his house burned down by the very gang he left, and his wife murdered. As such, this pisses you off, and off you trot on a revenge quest that involves bombing the heck out of every person, beast, or supernatural creature in your way. Like Bomberman, you start with a single bomb, able to affect a single tile in each cardinal direction, and can level up your speed, number of bombs you can lay at any time, and the number of tiles the flames spurt out. Like Binding of Isaac, each room you enter can have chests, explodables, shops, and enemies in some combination or other, and, if it has enemies in, you can’t leave until everyone is dead. Somewhere in each level is a boss, and defeating this boss gets you to the next level. Take enough damage, you die. There’s more to it than that, with special abilities, experience from enemies (your main means of levelling up your stats), Snake Oil (Like potions in traditional roguelikes, these have a random effect, although they always seem to cause 1 damage in doing so), and starting items (Which can improve your stats or have other effects, like the Broom, which clears all non-fire, non-chest obstacles in a room once everybody’s dead.)
Part of the reason I have to explain this is because what flaws this game has, it inherits from its inspirations. Put at its simplest, the worst level enemies are more threatening than the bosses, but once you get the pain train rolling, that’s it, very little is going to stop you except the spectre of Yet Another Stupid Death. Let’s take the first level as an example.
The boss for the level is either a goat from the fires of hell (and its normal goat summons) or a carnival fire-breather turned bandit, who has, er… Fire. Both are heavily pattern based, and knowing the pattern… Largely nullifies their difficulty. Okay, fine, they’re first bosses. Taking damage from them once you know the pattern is, however, just plain embarassing.
I’m not even going to *pretend* the game isn’t using stereotypes. So yeah, be warned about that.
Now compare that to the rifleman and molotov thrower, both perfectly normal enemies. The rifleman only sleeps occasionally, wakes when you’re near or there’s a bomb nearby, and shoots. Yes, this blows up your bombs, so your tactic is to try to ambush him with the timed component, while also leaving you free to ambush him again. This is a lot trickier than it sounds. Similarly, the molotov thrower will, on seeing you, throw a 1-tile bomb in your direction. So, say, being 2 tiles away from him when he sees you guarantees that, unless your action is to run away immediately, you’re going to take damage.
Even normal enemies can, for want of a better word, be tedious. Both farmer types, for example, will run the hell away if they see a bomb, and only the white guys will occasionally fall asleep. Coyotes follow a very similar pattern, and the Crazed Miner… Ohhhh, I hate that guy. That guy is the worst of both worlds, because if he sees a bomb, his instinct will be to knock it the hell away before it explodes. Sometimes, you can use this. More often, it’s a case of having a very long range bomb.
Now, you might be getting the impression, from all this talk, that Bombslinger is a Bad Game. No. A game with some frustrating elements even after you’ve learned the enemy patterns, sure, and that’s certainly not a good thing, but there are interesting elements to the game, and it’s clear some thought has gone into it. For example, lesser versions of the hell-goat (who can also push bombs, but they have to charge to do so) present quite a few opportunities for the canny player, and some of the gun-toting enemies in the game (the cowboy and the gatling gunner) are, awkward placements aside, much more reasonable. The game uses sprites in a 3D space to mostly good effect, and with the exception of the farmers (Who just seem a bit awkward in the context, on a couple of levels), the enemy designs are interesting, and clearly communicate what they are and what they do.
YASD Strikes Again
So, Bombslinger, currently, is an interesting, but flawed game, experimenting with mixing elements that definitely seem to be able to fit together, even if they don’t quite gel right all the time, and, for four levels consisting of several arenas (the equivalent of a Bomberman World), a fair amount of unlocks and power ups to discover, and a soundtrack that works just fine, it’s not unreasonable to say this is alright. And good enough? Is good enough.
The Mad Welshman doesn’t have much to close with this time. He’s busy grappling with a hell-goat. Damned petsitting…