Bomberman is a classic video game series that has literally been around for a few decades. Starting out on the Nintendo NES and moving across many different consoles, Bomberman was a successful series that many gamers enjoyed. Recently though, little Bomberman made the next generation leap and fell way short. Hudson Soft’s Bomberman: Act Zero features all the next-generation goodies such as high definition video output and competitive multiplayer over Xbox Live, but lacks absolutely everything else, while baring almost no resemblance to its previous installments.
Hudson Soft tried a new approach to its Bomberman series on the Xbox 360. Instead of coming off as a cute little comic book like character, he had to be upgraded and more intense, after all this is the next-generation right? Bomberman is now an evil looking machine that is just a test subject in an experiment. This is almost the exact opposite of how Bomberman was portrayed in all the previous games. This is where Hudson Soft slipped up. Instead of sticking to what made their previous games good, they changed it completely and tried their best to make it appeal the to next-gen crowd. Sure it has HD graphics and online play, but everything else is seriously lacking in a huge way.
Bomberman just is not who he used to be...
Bomberman: Act Zero really only offers one gameplay type. Players can choose the color of their character and then are thrown into a sort of fighting grid and have to place bombs to blow up the other opponents. Controlling the bombs is nothing like the way they were on previous Bomberman games. In Act Zero you just place them and can’t manipulate them in any other way. In other Bomberman games you could blow up bombs until they were ten times the size of your head, bounce them on top of each other, bounce them around, denote them early, and a few other neat tricks. In Act Zero none of this is possible; however, there are a handful of power-ups that you can collect to increase the amount of damage your bombs can deliver.
One interesting part of Act Zero is that there are two ways to play the game, or two camera modes. There's the original view mode and a new mode called FPB, or First Person Bomber. The FPB camera mode is interesting and looks a little more intriguing for a Bomberman title, but in terms of functionality the bird’s eye view is much easier to use. The new FPB mode really isn’t very useful and doesn’t change the gameplay at all. Therefore there is still only one gameplay type for the entire retail game.
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