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Posted on April 20th, 2008 - 770 Reads

Rated Everyone Bomberman Land Nintendo Wii Review

-- Written by Saul Santiago



 In Bomberman Land for the Nintendo Wii, you take a trip with Bomberman and his friends as they head to Bomberman Land for some mini-game fun. That fun is quickly replaced by a hectic free for all tournament as you attempt to overthrow a villainous character who looks just like you. You use the Wii pointer (or the nunchuck analog stick) to move your character around the amusement park to gaming booths and acquire points from them. You need to acquire more points than your competitive friends in order to advance to the higher zones of the tournament to ultimately become Bomberman Land champion. You get the points by completing the mini-game challenges faster and achieving higher scores than your competition. At the beginning of each tournament, you get a pre-set amount of coins to spend in that zone on the various gaming booths, and once you've used up all your cash, the contestants with the most points move to the next zone, opening up new mini-game challenges. It's a simple setup, but you eventually unlock five zones 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 Wii pointer and the Wii's motion control. For example, one mini-game I liked had you moving through a dangerous maze using nothing but motion control to guide your character, while another had you in an archery contest where you aimed with your Wii pointer. The progression is pretty linear, though you will be demoted to previous zones if you don't rack up a certain amount of points per zone. Overall, the main mode of Bomberman Land is engaging and will offer plenty of challenge and things to do. There is also an Attractions Mode that lets you play just the mini-games. 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 3D models 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 3D characters never really impresses. Even at 480p, you'll find plenty of jaggies and not much detail to an of the characters or environments. The cutscenes are also pretty bland, with a text scroll loosely matching the generic animations on the characters. This is made extra tedious because you're not allowed to skip over them. 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 is quite disappointing. The lack of voice acting was expected, but the ancient sounding effects noises and general lack of memorable tunes was a letdown. There isn't much of a surround presence in the soundtrack through DLP2 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 four other players, and anyone who's played Bomberman knows how much fun it can be with other people. Unfortunately, you can't play online via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection service, an odd and disappointing omission considering the DS version allows for online play. The classic Bomberman game contains twenty four maps and each map can be customized with different colors tiles for the bombable blocks, plus the game contains a "Wii mode" that has you using the pointer to drop bombs. So all things considered, Bomberman Land 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.

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