Bomberman World

THE BAD:
Single player is a bit more boring by comparison

SUMMARY:
I bought this game when I went round a friend’s house and played a Bomberman game on the Mega Drive. I liked it so much that I went and bought this game for the PS1 and I loved it even more. It’s got a pretty good single player mode, but the real fun of this game is the multiplayer mode.

In the single player mode you have to venture through 4 worlds made up of 5 levels each if I remember correctly. Each world has a distinct theme like water or fire and at the end of each world you need to defeat the boss before you can move on. Along the way you will come across many obstacles and enemies which you need to blow up with your bomb. At the start your bomb has a very small blast radius, it’s the blast that will go in every direction it can, that will destroy blocks and enemies. Some blocks are indestructible though. As you go on you get various power ups that allow you to do things such as lay more than one bomb at a time, increase your blast radius and even punch and throw bombs. One of my favourite ones was a remote control power up. This allowed you to detonate bombs whenever you liked instead of waiting for the fuse to run out. This came in so handy in the single player mode, alas it isn’t in the multiplayer game. I did manage to complete the single player mode after a while, but the multiplayer mode is by far the best part of this game.

In multiplayer mode you pick the person you want to be (cosmetic, it doesn’t actually mean anything) and then 5 of you battle in a one screen arena where the aim is to be the last person to survive. There are plenty of power-ups around and the amount and type depends on what level you’ve picked as there are 10 to choose from. You start off in confined sections of the map and have to blast your way into the arena and into combat. Within no time at all there are explosions everywhere and you have to keep a close eye on what’s going on to make sure you don’t get hit. In a lot of the levels the bomb blasts can go up to 6 or 7 squares long so you can be hit by a bomb that was nowhere near you. In the options menu before the game you can also select a team mode and change some in-game options. If you die you can reappear on the side of the map and throw bombs into the map to try and kill people in there. If your bomb blast manages to kill someone, and if you set the options right, then you will reappear in the map and can carry on fighting. It’s a very handy mutator. If there aren’t enough of you to make up the 5 people necessary then the rest can be controlled by the computer to keep the chaos levels high. There are 10 levels to play on ranging from a basic map with nothing special to ones with revolving doors, conveyor belts and jungle canopies. Each level brings something new with it.

Without a doubt this game is most fun when playing the multiplayer mode. It’s so simple to learn how to play it so it’s a great party game. Mastering the game may take a little while longer though. The range of options in multiplayer mode only adds to the replay value, which is already pretty high. I can’t really think of any downsides to this game. The single player mode isn’t great but the multiplayer mode more than makes up for it. I suppose better custom maps or the option to customise more than the basic map would have been nice, but the game is really good enough as it is.