Bomberman: Act Zero (Xbox 360)

While so far much of my coverage for the Bomberman series has had some sort of lead-in about my mixed feelings on the franchise, I have played enough of the games by now to say that I do think it’s bomb-dropping battle format can work when some creativity is used to shift up its gameplay. Trying to shake up a stagnant franchise can be a wise decision, especially when some games in it have a multiplayer format dependent more on players losing by making mistakes rather than winning by making strategic plays, but Bomberman: Act Zero thought the change the series needed to appeal to new players was not a change in the action but a change in tone and appearance.

 

Forgoing the cute and colorful world of robot bombers seen in previous games, Bomberman: Act Zero already layers its new gritty direction on thick with the idea that this game takes place after an apocalyptic world war has left the planet’s surface a wasteland. To add to the bleakness, beneath this desolate world there are automated programs still working to try and create the perfect soldier, left to mindlessly create new androids known as Bombermen to fight in a set of trials to determine if they have created the ultimate warrior. Bombermen come in different colors and come in male and female varieties, but they are functionally identical so seemingly the intent is to eventually create the perfect mind through these repetitive battles between otherwise near identical machines, but some load screens also imply there is some degree of self-awareness in the machines as they try to understand their reason for existing. There isn’t much resolution to this premise besides a perhaps appropriately bleak but still unfulfilling ending if you manage to make it to the end of the game’s single player campaign. Coupled with the intense designs given to Bombermen like a giant metallic claw and glowing scar over the eye on every model, it certainly seems like the game is trying hard to set itself apart from the games that came before and this could have actually been a nifty diversion in tone had the action been entertaining enough to support it.

 

Instead, Bomberman: Act Zero ends up more simplistic than most Bomberman games. In a round of Bomberman: Act Zero your goal is to wipe out the other bombers in a large rectangular maze. There is only a single maze on offer though, it being 13 rows tall and 19 columns wide while alternating between completely open rows and ones where every other space has a large cube to serve as a barrier. Your attack method is to place down energy bombs that detonate in a cross pattern, but the abundant unbreakable cubes make it so that it’s quite easy to run and hide from a normal bomb. To make the single maze at least a little more interesting, rounds will place soft blocks in different patterns in the usually open spaces, these needing to be blasted apart to make your way to the other players to try and blow them up. Soft blocks can make for occasionally cramped spaces where you might be able to corner someone with a bomb, but usually players start a fair bit apart and are given time to clear away some obstructions so it’s easier to actually avoid each other’s explosives once you can reach an opponent.

Luckily, you aren’t stuck with your wimpy and mostly ineffective bombs permanently. The soft blocks you break to navigate around the maze will contain power-ups. Some expand the range of your bomb’s explosion, others increase your speed to help you chase down or escape foes, and some pertain to how many bombs you are able to place at once so you can try to actually trap someone once there are too few soft blocks to really make a cornering strategy work. Even by powering up your basic abilities though, it’s not too hard for a smart player or even the somewhat mindless AI in this game to just find a spot behind an indestructible block and wait for nearby bombs to detonate since normally you have no control over its fuse. Only at its most chaotic with multiple Bombermen running around does it really feel like you can be caught unaware by the bomb placements of others, and while there is a mechanic where some explosions are slowed down by being a part of a chain so you can place a new bomb to be triggered as part of that reaction, the indestructible blocks still make it a bit too easy to avoid a bomb. Bombs can hurt the person who placed them or trigger other bombs so you can’t charge in with an aggressive placement unless you want to risk your own death, and so careful play becomes common and things come down to a time limit that starts to run out.

 

Once time starts running out, the arena will start to fill up with indestructible blocks that rain down from above on squares that light up to warn you about the incoming instant death hazard. If one lands on you, that’s the end, although if you’re playing against AI and both standing in the same spot the game shows no favoritism and considers it a loss for the both of you. Despite this rain of blocks tightening up the maze and removing the space to run about, it can still be difficult to actually corner someone with a bomb at this time as it’s quite difficult to cover every lane and column unless you get the extremely powerful power-ups during a stage. Penetrating Bombs can break through soft blocks so you can hit people who might still be surrounded by them and Remote Bombs let you place green energy bombs that blow up when you press a button. However, you can only have Penetrating or Remote Bombs, an idea that makes some sense in terms of balance but also means the two main means of speeding up the slow action by making you choose between having the ability to get around barriers or actually trap players. The two Walk Through power-ups are interesting, letting you walk through bombs so you can’t be trapped or walk through the soft blocks so you can get to players early in a match to harass them while the maze is still tight, but it can also make whoever has it too hard to pin down when that’s already a major issue in the Bomberman battle style across the series. Line Bomb lets you throw down a set of bombs in a line in front of you and pairs well with Infinite Bomb so you can cover an entire row or column, but due to the hard block spacing it’s still not too difficult to find a safe spot in the time it takes for the explosives to detonate.

 

This is certainly the Bomberman battle system at some of its most basic and with very little variation to spice it up, power-up distribution and soft block placement often not enough to add a unique spark to a round. However, there is something new Bomberman: Act Zero attempts to at least add a new way to play this singular maze design. There are two modes in Bomberman: Act Zero, First Person Bomber and Standard mode, and both can be played either in an online-only multiplayer format or in a single player challenge. First Person Bomber’s name is a misnomer, the game actually having you view your character from a behind-the-back angle where only the nearby maze is visible. You can angle the camera and zoom it out some to have a better lay of the land around you, but you can’t see the entire maze at once, this at least an interesting idea conceptually. One issue with the usual perspective in a Bomberman game is that it gives you a full view of the maze and thus you can always track the actions of other players and the bomb placement so you can easily hide from explosions. This is, in fact, how the Standard mode operates still, but it turns out robbing you of the information of enemy bomb placement instead means a blast you didn’t see can hit you and it was probably placed by a player who just left it and forgot it. If you know someone is in the area you can probably spot them with the camera adjustments so then you can see what they’re up to again and the surprise attack angle is lost, just making the action more likely to slip into cautious play as you likely won’t be able to take too much advantage of early parts of a round where soft blocks can still help you conceivably corner someone.

The two modes do have another difference beyond perspective though. First Person Bomber gives you a health bar so you can potentially survive a bomb’s blast and even walk your way out of it to receive only a bit of damage, this only making it even harder to actually take out another Bomberman. Standard mode has it where one hit by a bomb’s blast will kill you, but both modes do feature health pick-ups inside soft blocks on occasion. A health pick-up will either refill your life or boost up your max amount in First Person Bomber while Standard mode’s version of the pick up instead makes it so you can take an additional bomb blast before dying. These stack up if you can keep finding them, but there’s already a bit of an issue with perceiving damage in the game. Unless the blast is fatal to your character and they let out their agonizing wail of pain to signal their death, your Bomberman barely reacts to injury and it can be difficult to tell sometimes if being on the edge of a blast is going to hurt or did actually damage you.

 

Perhaps the most important element of the health pick-ups though are how they factor into single-player play. Tackling the campaign in either First-Person Bomber or Standard mode will require you to clear 100 levels in a row with no continues if you end up dying. Health pick-ups become key to surviving this monotonous demand that doesn’t get much harder after it’s introduced some of its tricks early like the more aggressive black Bombermen, but if you do die, there is no starting from where you left off so it must all be done in one agonizing dull sitting. Collecting health then becomes an insurance plan, and with some secret pick-up opportunities if you do some arcane actions on specific rounds you can at least get special boosts like a huge health boost in First Person Bomber. However, if time starts to run out and a block lands on you, it doesn’t matter how many lives or how much health you had, it’s an instant death and run ender. Having abundant health means you can just place bombs next to yourself and another bomber and weather it to kill them before the block fall gets you, but enemy bombers can get health pick-ups too and more worryingly some rounds in the 100 round gauntlet will start with reduced time so the block dropping starts immediately. Your power-ups do carry between rounds at least even though they pop out of you if you get hurt, but you basically try to become overpowered early on and then go on autopilot doing things like the walk through blocks trick or the infinite+line combo over and over hoping nothing goes wrong for you. The AI opponents are sometimes dumb enough to accidentally kill each other but other times canny enough to keep hiding just so from your explosives until that annoying block rain threatens your run, and while having some rounds at least try to be different with how enemies and soft blocks are placed is wise, even in rounds like one where you and the opponent both can grab a bunch of health pick-ups the action doesn’t really feel spiced up so much as drawn out through some complication that won’t change how you play that much.

THE VERDICT: Bomberman: Act Zero’s tone, while unusually grim, is bland and bleak for the sake of it but not the core issue at the game’s heart. Fighting in the same barely changing stage already guaranteed repetitive action, but the incorrectly named First Person Bomber mode attempts to rectify the standard mode’s usual reliance on winning by way of others making mistakes by instead hiding information so people also lose by not being able to see their death coming. It’s either going to be too easy to avoid dying thanks to the bad placement of indestructible blocks that invalidate all but overpowered players and lucky breaks or someone will slip up and thankfully speed up a boring round of play. The single player being a monotonous set of 100 rounds with no continue option puts these issues on greater display even with the health pick-ups to try and make it at least possible, but even winning a single match in Bomberman: Act Zero is unrewarding, let alone 100 in a row.

 

And so, I give Bomberman: Act Zero for Xbox 360…

An ATROCIOUS rating. An alternate interpretation on a game series can be an amusing diversion, and while the game came out and likely made many fans of the series afraid this could be Bomberman’s future going forward, I have both the benefit of knowing it’s not a permanent tone shift and little interest in keeping the Bomberman status quo in place. Yet still, I cannot ignore the flaws found in Bomberman: Act Zero’s awful approach to reinvention, because trying to make the bombers cool androids to appeal to teens isn’t even close to the game’s main problem. The single-player is structured in a hostile way, the 100 consecutive rounds without continues likely meant to be a grueling task so people can’t say they finished it quickly even though the content being offered is creatively barren and hits on the issues inherent in vanilla Bomberman battle design. Having the one standard map that makes avoiding danger easy makes it so that actually taking out other players is going to come down to having abilities like walking through blocks that skew things too heavily in your favor or just hoping they don’t go for a good hiding spot or respond to your obvious approach intelligently. First Person Bomber is a mess in all regards, the name already incorrect and the perspective not good for the gameplay style since denying you information instead means there’s likely even less strategy involved in a win, especially when you factor in a health bar that lets players escape mistakes and drag on a match. The block rain being so brutal in single-player and still somewhat ineffective in herding players together to try and make them more aggressive just shows the Bomberman formula has been pushed to a point of breaking where apologists can’t even work up a good defense in its name, and with these problems in place, the empty ending and basic character customization just ensure even the tone shift lacks the substance to make playing it at least intriguing.

 

Bomberman: Act Zero tried a new coat of a paint and a new camera angle and not really much else while also scrapping years of learning how to really change how Bomberman plays. Map variety, power-ups that change your capabilities in helpful yet balanced ways, and the means to actually catch foes off-guard rather than just lucking into a good hit can spice up most any Bomberman and ones before Act Zero did at least achieve this on occasion, but Bomberman: Act Zero isn’t the only game in the series guilty of not hitting these marks. However, the single player is so stale, repetitive, and ill-conceived that there’s no real escaping the fundamental problems that taint every round.