Bomberman jihads Xbox Live Arcade

Bomberman Live released on XBLA last Wednesday, and thankfully it's much better than its previous Xbox 360 incarnation.

I purchased the game earlier this week and since then have had a chance to spend some time with it. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, although my previous Bomberman experience is fairly limited. I admit that I completely sucked ass, losing my first 10 consecutive games against the easy (read: retard) computer opponents, but I've since learned what the hell I'm doing.

Bomberman Live includes new maps, along with the old standby "classic arena". These maps all have various gimmicks to them. There's the futuristic map with teleporter tiles, the desert map with quicksand, and a pirate themed map with power-ups in the center. The classic map is still quite fun to play itself, and most of the new maps are as well. I found however that some of them got annoying pretty quickly. When playing online I could often hear people bemoaning certain maps popping up.

There are four game modes to play, which at first might sound interesting, but you'll quickly realize that there are really only 2 modes with slight variations. In addition to the standard mode there is Paint Bomb, Zombie and Bombing Run. In Paint Bomb mode blasts paint the areas of the floor they touch your color. The player with the highest number of tiles when time expires wins. Zombie mode is a slight variation on this, in which you respawn after being killed, with your painted tiles reset. Zombie matches are frequently decided in the last 10 seconds because of these mechanics. Bombing Run seems to behave like the classic mode except everything is a little bit faster. These modes feel fairly uninspired, but Zombie is a nice diversion.

Complementing the array of maps and game types are the power-up sets. When choosing the parameters for a match the player is presented with "Beginner", "Intermediate" and "Advanced" power-up sets. There is an additional set of power-downs that can be enabled, as well as "Skulls" which act as another form of power-down. These power-downs seems to prove more frustrating than entertaining and will likely see little use. I found that the game became much less interesting when using anything but the Advanced power-up set. Switching to Beginner power-ups can be useful for learning how to play as it removes most of the complexity of Bomberman Live, however.

New to Bomberman Live is the ability to change the costume of your character. As you play games against the computer you can collect costume pieces to alter your character. These costumes can be used in multiplayer, making what seems like an afterthought actually useful. The costumes help to lessen the confusion of which character you are in an 8 player match. Overall the costumes are fairly lacking, but there is an achievement for tracking them all down so I'm sure some of you will spend hours to do it.

Four player local multiplayer is supported, the other four slots can be filled with computer opponents. Eight player multiplayer is available online. There is some fun to be had offline with Bomberman but the computer opponents definitely lack the creativity of their human counterparts. The game really shines in online multiplayer. The ability to get 4 local players together into a game with 4 online players is very nice. I found online play to be very smooth. Matchmaking seems to work properly and currently getting a game is not difficult. The game played virtually lag free for me, which is important in a timing sensitive game like Bomberman.

Overall I'd say that I've been having a lot of fun with Bomberman, and I'd certainly rate it as one of my better purchases on Xbox Live Arcade. If you plan to play it online or with friends I'd say it's a great investment. If you're planning on playing it offline primarily, you'd have to ask yourself just how much you like Bomberman. I will, however, say this: It's just more Bomberman. If you're looking for something revolutionary this isn't it. This is a very well put together, competent showing of Bomberman. Looking at it in that context, I enjoyed it a lot. Hudson didn't take a lot of chances with this release, but hey, follow the link at the top of this post if you want to see what happened last time they took chances.