Bomberman Land Touch 2 Review

In Bomberman Land Touch 2 for the Nintendo DS, you take a trip with Bomberman and his friends as they head to Bomberman Land for some mini-game fun. You use the stylus to move your character around the amusement park to gaming booths and acquire coins from them. You get the coins by completing the mini-game challenges to unlock different parts of Bomberman Land that have more game-filled areas. Each area has a gate with a number representing the coins that you must possess in order to proceed and unlock more of Bomberman Land. It’s a simple setup, but you eventually unlock a rather large area filled with characters and mini-games.

The main adventure portion of Bomberman involves the aforementioned romp through Bomberman Land, which unfolds through a series of minigames, and these are the main gameplay mechanic of the adventure mode. The mini-games in Bomberman are pretty hit or miss, with some being genuinely fun and others being quite inventive in their use of the touch screen. And yeah, some are lame. For example, one mini-game I liked had you jumping rope by tapping the screen , while another had you spinning your stylus on the touch screen to roll Bomberman past a an obstacle course with bombs in the way. The progression is pretty linear, though you will need to backtrack sometimes to reach areas that you passed up before because you didn’t have the right amount of coins to get through the gates. Overall, the main mode of Bomberman Land Touch 2 is engaging and will offer plenty of challenge and things to do. You eventually unlock music and items that you can access later via a collectibles menu.

The graphics are simplistic, which is generally what a Bomberman game looks like, but the 2D sprites definitely could’ve benefited from a bit more detail or frames of animations. As you walk through the amusement park, you will notice different characters walking around, statues, and the aforementioned booths. It never really gets crowded, and the top-down view featuring the 2D characters never really impresses. The top screen is mostly used to show the map of the area you’re in as well as the locations of the characters around you. The cutscenes are also pretty bland, with a text scroll loosely matching the generic animations on the characters. Overall, the game could’ve easily benefitted from some more texture and character detail. Still, the colors are generally bright and the graphics maintain an upbeat tone throughout.

The sound in Bomberman Land Touch 2 seems pretty standard compared to other DS games. As usual, you want to wear headphones to get the most of out of the music, but nothing ever stands out and the music never feels vibrant enough to match the colorful and playful nature of the game.

Thankfully, Hudson included the classic Bomberman game in this package, and that’s a very big bonus. You can play with up to eight other DS players wirelessly, and anyone who’s played Bomberman knows how much fun it can be with other people. Even better, you only need one DS cartridge for multiplayer, though having multiple cartridges even more multiplayer content like additional maps. Finally, you can play online via Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection service, though this limits the playing field to four players. The classic Bomberman game contains forty seven maps and each map can be customized with different colors tiles for the bombable blocks.

So all things considered, Bomberman Land Touch 2 is a competent package combining a new mini-game driven mode along with the classic Bomberman game. Fans of the series should be more than happy with Bomberman Land, and folks looking for some mini-game action would do well to see if any of the forty featured mini-games are their cup of tea.