Bomb Chicken (Switch)
Some indie games take one simple premise and run with it as far as it’ll take them, and in the case of Bomb Chicken, that premise is everything you do requires bombs. Need to reach somewhere higher? Lay down a stack of bombs to propel you up to it. Need to defeat an enemy? Bomb them or drop onto them from atop a pile of bombs. Need to blow up an obstacle or activate a switch? The means should be pretty obvious by this point.
At the center of this bomb-focused game is of course the Bomb Chicken. In a world where BFC, a clear parody of Kentucky Fried Chicken, has dominated the fast food world with its special blue hot sauce covered chicken meals, we find ourselves in a strange temple where they seem to process both the birds and the blue goo. A careless worker tosses eggs into a back room where a statue leaks the delicious substance, and when an egg happens to end up in the path of a drop, it mutates the bird within into a large round creature that, instead of laying eggs, can push out giant bombs. The bird has a natural desire to want to escape this place where its brethren are cooked and eaten, but as it makes its escape, a strange voice tied to statues around the temple begins helping and encouraging the bird. The Bomb Chicken never speaks a word, but it follows the voice on the adventure, entering factory areas, the nearby jungle, and more as it tries to get out of the reach of the fast food giant. Along the way we see some light satire of the heavy fast food focus of the modern world, employees found laying on their backs to suck up leaks of the delicious goo even though it makes them explosive and the temple where the food is made being an unsanitary and dangerous mess.
The game does seem to have a dark, mysterious tone as you move forward, but it never crosses into horror and never shows anything outright cruel to the chickens despite their obvious fates. To help the game avoid being too dour, it has a very animated style applied to every motion. The chubby chicken hero at the center has a very bouncy strut and compresses quickly any time it pushes out a bomb, the explosions quite detailed for pixel art and anything hit by them forming their own smoke cloud or spray of shrapnel to really lend some power to the explosives you’ll be relying on so heavily. The screen shake can get pretty intense whenever multiple bombs are going off at once, but for the most part it has a fun art style that can pull off cute and foreboding pretty well.
Exploring BFC’s pyramid takes place in a side-scrolling perspective, the chicken having to overcome a series of puzzles and a few boss fights to make it to the end of the game’s 29 levels. Since you only really have the bomb mechanic to worry about, the controls are simple, but the execution of puzzle solutions quickly becomes more and more difficult. Each bomb has a fairly quick fuse, and if you aren’t clear of the bomb when it blows, you will die. The chicken has no durability, killed by any enemy, spike, fire, or any other deadly object that ends up touching it, but you do have a few lives to help you stay in the game. A death will reset you to the start of the current room, most areas making sure to divide up the puzzles so you aren’t repeating a long sequence of them unless they’re all fairly simple. If you run out of lives though, you will have to restart the entire level, but you can gain more lives by collecting blue gems and giving them to your talking statue guide. The gems are thus made the reward for being thorough or going the extra mile, secret areas and the like giving you more blue gems so you can earn more lives to survive. You’ll definitely need them too, because Bomb Chicken’s central mechanic is quite prone to backfiring.
The reliance on such destructive tools for all the game’s action can often lead to moments of micromanaging time or trying to get fuse detonations to line up, and with enemies who will move in real time and sometimes mess with your work, Bomb Chicken’s pressure to act quickly not just with your bombs’ fuses but with the level design can create both intense and frustrating moments. The first boss is a deadly chase, the player needing to outrun a giant saw by blowing things up quickly or activating switches to clear a path. You will likely die as you can’t anticipate perfectly what lies ahead, but the gradual learning of it is a satisfying process since you get further each time. Other areas though can just feel like you’ve got the solution down but the timing ends up fiddly. Here you will definitely feel the limitations of the bomb laying. You automatically stack yourself up on them and they’ll detonate in a chain if they’re near to each other, but the game likes to place hazards or limit movement space to make precise timing and positioning necessary. You can push bomb stacks to send them flying off until they hit something, the game even getting more creative with this mechanic when it adds angled deflectors to send them flying off in new directions. Using bomb stacks as shields against dart traps is a decent extension of a bomb stack’s uses, but weighing down switches with them puts a timer on your following actions before they detonate, meaning that these time sensitive puzzles often require some repeated executions until everything finally clicks.
After a while, much of the bomb puzzles become less about interesting twists on your single skill and more about doing things you’ve done before with a new complication. Since you can’t jump there are many times you just need to stack up bombs to get over a small pit or spike, and the new pressure will be something like a flying enemy or crumbling platform. These aren’t necessarily bad tests of your mastery with this skill, the later levels feeling appropriately difficult rather than escalating into something unfair or tedious, the game saving the tightest time requirements and most difficult puzzle solutions for secret areas. However, relying on just the bomb laying does begin to lose its appeal over time. Enemies that detonate your stack on their own or can’t be permanently destroyed don’t change how you play, they just add in new ways to fail when a foe works its way towards you and you have no escape route. An interesting mechanic like the rippling goo that sends out deadly waves whenever you detonate a bomb on it are balanced out by less enjoyable ones like dark areas in a game where situational awareness is key to avoiding your own explosions. Mainly, most everything feels like it takes longer than it should, detonations needing to constantly be accounted for and things like they few bosses often having long patterns before you can do your own time-sensitive attack method. It feels like the game could have done with evolving the bomb mechanic in some form, since even as the demands of it grow, you’re still mostly waiting on the timing to line up or doing the same bomb stacking methods to get around. The game’s length does mean you don’t get outright tired of the bomb mechanic, but it explores the space its confined itself in about as much as it can while still relying on stack jumping and the detonation waiting periods.
THE VERDICT: Bomb Chicken’s main mechanic is pushed to interesting places, but it’s always held back by the complete devotion to it. The level designs scale in difficulty well and there are some thrilling challenges to be found here and there, but a lot of the game is about getting your timing perfect for detonations or dealing with a world you aren’t the best fit for. A lot of the puzzles are tied to outpacing the fuse of your only tools for solving them, slowing down the game because of the constant presence of fuse timers, and the fact those tools can kill you and reset the room can grow frustrating as the game throws more ways of inciting accidental deaths. The game does do a pretty thorough exploration of what its simple mechanic can do and has some neat gimmicks related to it, and its pixel art is certainly fun to look at, but Bomb Chicken’s excellent craftsmanship in those areas feels like it would have gotten along better with a more versatile way of interacting with it all.
And so, I give Bomb Chicken for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Moments where everything comes together into fluid explosive puzzle solutions and skillful overcoming of a difficult level give Bomb Chicken plenty of satisfying moments, but to get to those often requires messing around with the less exciting puzzles where you need to micromanage your bombs a little too much. While having every button lay a bomb instead of an egg is cute and the commitment to it is commendable in its own way, it does mean a lot of the experience hinges on the execution of this single central mechanic. The line between a success and failure in Bomb Chicken is quite often just a little too close, the bombs not always going to kill you if you mess up but their fuses can often lead to you repeating a puzzle until finally the timing lines up or some pesky hazard or enemy has stopped harassing the process. For what it’s engaging with, the stage designs are quite well put together, mixing in new things the bombs can interact with, but since you’re always stuck unable to do much besides lay and push these time sensitive explosion tools about, your participation in the puzzles isn’t as exciting as it could be, partially because the pace is so often slowed down by needing to ensure everything goes to plan.
Bomb Chicken is still an interesting play all things considered, but the game quite wisely cuts things off at 29 levels. When it comes down to it, bombs really don’t feel like the best mechanic to base a whole game around, and it’s why I often took umbrage with the execution of Bomberman games. Those games knew to toss in variations outside of just what you’re using the bombs on though, but they often suffered from the problem with needing to wait on fuses as well. Bomb Chicken mixes in timed fuses with puzzles and enemies that are time sensitive, and while it tries to accommodate this by not being too punishing towards failures, it does mean even its best moments can be hampered by the mechanic you need to use to experience them.