Bomberman Ultra (PS3)

By now I’ve played 4 Bomberman games for The Game Hoard and a few more before I started the site, and while I’ve found ones I have enjoyed and disliked in doing so, almost every time I talk about Bomberman I bring up that I don’t find its multiplayer component compelling. Its design is too focused on players losing slow battles through human error rather than something like skill or strategy more clearly determining the winner. After four Bomberman reviews where the game was good or bad primarily because of how it handled its single-player side though, I come to a game that is designed purely around Bomberman’s multiplayer. Besides the option to play the game against AI-controlled players, that means Bomberman Ultra only has that multiplayer component to try and appeal to me after so many years of my chilly reception towards its ideas and format.

 

To begin with the important details, a standard multiplayer match in Bomberman Ultra involves up to eight players entering a large rectangular arena viewed from above. Everyone plays as the titular character Bomberman, although in this installment you can unlock and incredibly high amount of costume pieces you can use to customize your bomber’s appearance to make them stand out. Bomberman’s only inherent ability is the power to place a bomb, this explosive filling one square of the grid-like design of the arena and exploding in a cross shape that is three squares wide and three squares tall. Almost every arena adheres to a design concept where a hard unbreakable block is placed every other tile of the grid while blocks you can destroy are randomly placed at the beginning of the match. Players must first break through enough destructible blocks to reach the other players before they can start trying to blow each other up, the last bomber standing being the winner.

 

Unfortunately, the fact that every bomb has a fuse means that you can’t really surprise other players with a sudden explosion. It’s very easy to see when an opponent is trying to attack and unless you place yourself in a bad situation it will be hard for them to trap you with their explosives to take you out. Luckily there is a round timer, so if players are wise enough not to endanger themselves, a sudden death mode will kick in where deadly blocks rain down from above and start shrinking the available space to fight in. The need to avoid this danger can lead to players more naturally stumbling into the path of an explosion as you can plan around how the arena’s available space is shrinking, but the fact it needs this and it so often can reach this sudden death option shows how easy it is for a match to stagnate. With just the basics in play, pretty much your only hope of winning comes from others slipping up in some form.

Power-ups are a natural part of the formula though and are meant to prevent these stalemates from happening, but their ability to do so varies. After destroying a soft block you might find a power-up inside, the most common of these being a stat boost that lasts until match’s end. These will help boost your speed, enable you to place more bombs at a time, and expand the blast radius of your bombs, but even if you’re able to place plenty of bombs with huge explosions, the grid-like layout of the indestructible blocks can still make it easy for an enemy to hide from the blast. The way these connect with other power-ups in play can allow for some strategy and cunning to slip into the action though. The Beginner power-up set is a little underwhelming, only the Bomb Kick feeling like a meaningful addition to this otherwise stat item focused lineup as it allows you to kick a bomb away and potentially surprise a player with a moving explosive. Intermediate gets a bit more interesting with the glove that lets you pick up a bomb and carry it, allowing you to chase a player or even hurl it over the arena edge so it pops up on the other side to surprise opponents. Advanced has all the power-ups on though, and this adds unique bomb types like a mine that players will have to avoid and remote bombs you can activate when you please so that a similar lingering threat can hang around as a form of area denial. Power-downs also enter this mode as do skulls that can cause strange effects like automatic bomb drops or super speed when picked up, but one of the most interesting items is the Dangerous Bomb that gives players the chance to place a bomb that ignores hard blocks and explodes in a square radius that is much harder to hide from than the cross shape that obeys the natural alleys of the arena designs.

 

So, if you have all the power-ups on or only turn off ones like the stat decreases that aren’t too impactful, Bomberman Ultra can start to feel like players are able to execute plans of attack instead of hoping the chaos catches up with anyone but them. Some other ideas like the Revenge Cart add a little to this small bump in quality as well, players who are eliminated early enough able to rejoin in little vehicles that travel around the arena’s edge and can launch bombs in at a slow rate to try and kill other players to take their place. This is slow-going and Revenge Cart bombs aren’t any harder to avoid than regular ones, but at least it keeps eliminated players mildly engaged as they wait out the final players who can sometimes struggle to even approach each other for fear of death. If there were only a few extra power-ups over the usual then this still wouldn’t help Bomberman Ultra completely shake off my cold reception to its gameplay format, but this multiplayer focused title thankfully didn’t just settle into the regular features.

 

Bomberman Ultra features a total of 14 unique arenas, although a majority of them are all reliant on the same grid design where hard blocks are placed in the same set location. They do vary up their visual design at least such as those hard blocks being gravestones in Ghost Town and Full Tilt going for a motorway aesthetic, but the only big shakeup to the grid of indestructible blocks involves replacing these lane dividers with pits that you can’t walk over but the bomb explosions can travel over so there are no safe barriers players can hide behind. The more important shake up found in these levels though are their Arena Features, these being small gimmicks that can influence the play in some way. Lost World for example has quicksand that appears in a tile and will trap anyone who steps in it, and with certain areas becoming impossible to travel based on the quicksand fluctuations, you can trap players a little better than usual. Teleporters, cyclones, and trap doors all add little changes to how the maze is navigated, but the casino-themed High Stakes just has you choose a different level’s gimmick to use as do Medieval Times, Cavity Land, and Robot Factory. These levels seemed ripe for their own special ideas, but instead the only let you have one gimmick from certain other levels active at a time. These arena features are a step in the right direction despite the impact of some gimmicks feeling minimal, but shaking up the formula some is definitely appreciated. Plunder Isle completely breaks the mold in having the bombers fight to first blast their way to a hoard of power-ups either inside or outside of all the destructible blocks, but these battles are often just a race to grab everything and too simple since the first player out usually can steamroll the others while they lack any recourse.

The willingness to explore new ideas already made regular Bomberman multiplayer a bit more interesting and varied despite its inherent problems, but there’s a bit of an ace in the hole waiting for making Bomberman Ultra appealing even if you don’t normally like the multiplayer. There are a set of different gameplay modes on offer, and while some are limited only to the basic arena, there are a few highlights to be found. Starting with the weaker two that are limited to the generic Classic level, Bombing Run just speeds up movement a bit, making it a little easier to slip up, and Friendly Fire has a pit-filled arena with players able to place tons of bombs so that it’s fully embracing the frantic chaos of placing bombs and hoping you might randomly kill an opponent. Paint Bomb and Zombie though are available in most arenas and are a surprisingly strong match for the concepts at play in Bomberman.

 

In Paint Bomb, the player is trying to claim arena tiles rather than aiming to kill other players. When your bombs explode, every tile caught in the blast radius is shifted to your color, the goal being to have more territory under your control when the timer runs out. The slow fuse that makes it hard to be strategic with bomb placement in regular play is now a limiter that forces you to consider when to place bombs as you might be able to claim more territory if you run to the right spot first. In Paint Bomb you can be killed still, and with that focus on grabbing territory it is more natural people will slip up and end up in a blast radius by mistake since survival isn’t the main focus.

 

Zombie is an interesting variation of Paint Bomb where you are still doing territory control and aiming to have the most tiles but you don’t die when you are hit by a blast. Instead, if you are damaged by a bomb in Zombie, you lose all the tiles you have claimed, making it still important to not let yourself be blown up. It feels like actual strategies can develop in this mode like trying to break soft blocks so your bombs are better for claiming squares or focusing on claiming as much of the available area as possible so other players need to play catch-up. You might want to drop your bombs to steal spaces or focus on a specific region of the level, and there are clear pros and cons to such approaches that tie in to how the opposition is playing. If one thing about Paint Bomb and Zombie comes up short it’s the fact it can’t mix with Arena Features, meaning it is condemned to that unexciting grid with the alternating hard blocks save for in Blast!’s pit focused design. More than ever though the power-ups get to shine as covering more ground with a blast or being able to move a bomb to different spots can change how you control the arena, and while I can understand that it might be a little too unusual to be the game’s base mode, it could be a lot more fun if Bomberman chooses to iterate on this mode more or mixed it with the other features.

THE VERDICT: Bomberman Ultra devotes itself purely to multiplayer battles, and while the game’s basic design can lead to slow fights where the focus is less on tactics and more on waiting for someone to make a mistake, the abundance of extra options helps Bomberman Ultra avoid feeling simple and mindless. Certain power-ups do allow for brief moments of strategy or clever play and arena hazards add a variable you can try to plan around or need to avoid as a more active threat than easily avoided enemy bombs. It’s the extra modes, particularly Paint Bomb and Zombie, that really help show the game’s potential for gameplay that can balance an easy to understand goal with the room for players to approach the action with a bit more thought. Those territory control modes do miss out on some of the options the more basic battle mode has though, so Bomberman Ultra mostly just scrapes by having enough options that you’ll probably like some way to play, you just won’t have the level of variation within that gameplay style to help it shine.

 

And so, I give Bomberman Ultra for PlayStation 3…

An OKAY rating. Bomberman Ultra is on the right track in throwing a bunch of different modes at the multiplayer in search of something that can make the most use out of the concept of bomb battles in small mazes, but the fact they can be mutually exclusive really hurts the overall potential of the title. If you could do Paint Bomb with teleporters active than managing your controlled space can have an extremely interesting variable in play, but you can only do regular battles with those teleporters on so Paint Bomb’s potential is diminished. The fact that so many maps just have the hard blocks placed in the same place all the time also feels like a huge area of missed potential as those always available defensive barriers diminish the ability to actually trap players with your bombs. It may take some tinkering with the options to find which mode of play suits you, but Bomberman Ultra does begin to brush against concepts that could really help the series grow if they weren’t so regimented. Perhaps a little too much effort went into the 54 costume sets rather than the 14 arenas, but the basic battle formula was tweaked just enough that Bomberman Ultra has the potential to avoid falling into a rut. However, at times the action can still feel like it leans a bit too much on punishing players for making a mistake rather than rewarding them for trying to make a clever play.

 

Coming out the other side of Bomberman Ultra still hasn’t won me over on Bomberman’s general multiplayer design, but ideas like the Dangerous Bomb, Paint Bomb, and the flirting with making arenas more than the same grid over and over do point to a potential Bomberman multiplayer approach that I would certainly enjoy. Traditional fans of the series will probably be pleased to find the same familiar ideas available for experiencing the chaotic action, but hopefully they can see the merit in the modes and ideas that make Bomberman Ultra’s gameplay into something a little deeper than the usual formula of running around a maze and hoping your bombs will kill people.