Review: Bomberman Land Touch! 2 (NDS)

It only seems like yesterday since the last Bomberman title but here we have Bomberman Land 2 in all its incredibly colourful glory. For some reason our beloved demolition expert seems to have turned into some kind of child aimed character. We cant quite work out why this has happened, but from looking at the box you can tell there is going to be some annoyingly twee music and possibly irritating overly excited voices contained within.

Hudson have taken it upon themselves to turn Bomberman into some sort of bizarre party game. This release continues the trend of the previous title by turning the single player mode into some sort of sub par WarioWare carnival. Bomberman wanders around each of the different zones playing various games to earn medals. These can then be used to unlock doors which lead to more games.

While the games themselves are acceptable (if a little on the simple side) and work well with the stylus, it is hard to imagine anyone buying it for a collection of simple mini games. This is Bomberman for crying out loud! Having a single player mode which only on occasion actually wants you to blow something up is bizarre.

It doesn’t help that everything is so incredibly easy. The game may now be clearly aimed at kids but unless they are under the age of about six they aren’t going to get much fun out of it. It just makes us glad they left any form of single player out of the recent Xbox Live Arcade title if this is what we could have ended up with.

Everyone knows that multi-player is really what Bomberman games are about and in that respect it stands up well. You can have eight player local games from one card or take to the Nintendo Wi-Fi service to battle four players online. There are a ton of maps and play modes to choose from, with all the power ups and hazards we have come to expect over the years. The game works a whole lot better in this perspective than the Live Arcade edition. The problem is this version of DS multi-player Bomberman has been released twice before. This in itself would not be so bad but the multi-player here is not compatible with that in the previous Bomberman Land.

Here at Gamestyle, we remember a time when Bomberman didn’t really have adventures. Back in the day the single player mode used to consist of walking around a level blowing up all the enemies and then running to the door before the time ran out. Oh how we long for those days again. This collection comprises of simplistic party games and a multi-player mode that has been available since the 8-bit days. If you have no other way to play Bomberman then by all means pick this up for the online modes, otherwise it is best left on the shelf.

Rating: 5 / 10

Words by Gareth Chappell