Bomberman Land Touch! (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.1 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Frank Provo
• Reviewed on: 12/19/2006
• Released on: 11/07/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Bomberman Land Touch! (DS) Review

When Bomberman DS was released in the summer of 2005, Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connect service wasn't yet up and running. If you wanted to get a multiplayer game going, you had to invite people over and cram them into the same room. While that might have been fine for people with plenty of friends and large homes, it certainly wasn't optimal for loners, apartment dwellers, or anyone that desired to compete against people outside their local area. Thankfully, Wi-Fi Connect is going strong now, and Atlus and Hudson have responded by publishing a Bomberman game that takes advantage of the service. With Bomberman Land Touch!, you no longer have to organize meet ups to get in a few rounds of explosive goodness. Instead, you can use your Internet connection to seek out opponents in mere seconds and flaunt your bomb battling skills anytime you want.

Bomberman Land Touch! is actually two games in one. There's the classic battle mode, of course, but also residing on the cartridge is a collection of 36 different minigames that primarily use the touch screen. If you've ever played any of Nintendo's Mario Party games, then the shoot-outs, races, dance challenges, and puzzles here will all seem very familiar to you. You can experience these Bomberman-themed party games by playing through the story mode's role-playing quest, or you can access them individually from the main menu, which offers the additional benefit of multiplayer play. Minigames can't be played online, but as many as four players situated in the same room can participate using only a single copy of the game. These brief minigames are fun when friends are involved, and it probably won't take much effort to cajole spectating bystanders into a game, since the controls only involve dragging and tapping with the stylus.

Even though the minigames are genuinely fun, the main draw for most people will be the classic battle mode, where up to eight players can fight it out in any of 20 top-down arenas. Using the directional pad and buttons, each player can move his or her bomber dude (or dudette) around the arena and place bombs that explode after a few seconds. Arenas span both screens and incorporate tunnels, trap doors, and conveyor belts. The general idea is to blow up your friends and be the last bomber standing, although some arenas introduce rules that change the conditions for victory from outright survival to capturing the most territory or racking up the most kills. During a match, soft bricks in the arena can be blown up to reveal any of a half dozen power-up items. Most have beneficial side effects, such as increasing your bomb capacity and elongating your bombs' blast radius, but you also have to keep an eye out for downgrades that have the opposite effect. Longtime fans may be disappointed that Hudson left out the boxing glove and remote detonator items that were included in the mid-1990s Bomberman games, but their removal doesn't really hurt the game or ratchet down the intensity level whatsoever. Just using the standard assortment of items, things get pretty crazy when there are at least three or four people involved.

Continue reading