Bomberman Blitz

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Local Wireless)

.

Review:

Bomberman Blitz is an Arcade-style Party Game originally released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2009, and it was later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS was released. If you’ve played any Bomberman game before, you know the drill – you and the other players move around a mazelike environment dropping bombs to destroy blocks, grab power-ups, and ideally take out your enemies. The only thing that’s really new here is the platform the game released on.

That’s not to say that this is a lazy release – Bomberman Blitz has plenty of customizable features so players can set up a game the way they want to play it. There’s multiple map types, game variants, and players can even independently change the difficulty level of each of the bots, change them all at once, or remove them entirely.

The gameplay here plays as well as Bomberman ever did, and as always this makes for a great Party Game. Unfortunately, this is a large part of the reason why this game’s value now is dubious at best – this is a game meant to be played in multiplayer, and as I type this out, we are in the final days of the eShop, after which no one will be buying this particular version of Bomberman. And as this game does not support download play, and the online support for the game appears to have been long ago terminated, that means that to play this game as intended, you’ll need to hurry up and convince a group of friends to each buy a copy of this game before the Nintendo 3DS eShop closes. Even with the small $5 price tag, that’s a tall ask, especially when a version of Bomberman is playable on just about every game platform ever released.

I suppose I should say that this version of the game features a nice colorful pixel art look, with energetic music that does a good job backing the frantic action. Again, this is about what you would expect from a Bomberman game.

Look, I know I don’t sound especially enthusiastic about this game, and it’s not the fault of poor Bomberman Blitz. When it first released, the $5 price tag for a feature-rich, fully-functional Bomberman game with 8-player local and online support on a handheld was undoubtedly phenomenal. But 14 years later, as I write this now, there’s just no reason to get this game. Buy a Bomberman game on a current-generation platform instead.

tl;dr – Bomberman Blitz is an Arcade-style Party Game that brings the classic Bobmerman series to Nintendo’s handheld for a mere $5, and it’s a pretty good version of the game too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything to stand out against the countless other versions of the game, and you’ll have an easier time finding others to play with if you get a Bomberman game on a modern platform instead. Skip this one.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}