Terra Bomber

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is also included in the Terra Trilogy bundle, along with Terra Lander and Terra Lander II – Rockslide Rescue.)

Terra Bomber is a Shmup released on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game is clearly designed to imitate the classic 1981 arcade Shmup, Scramble, adding in a new power-up in the vein of Gradius’s “Option” support drones.

The visuals in this game have been designed to look similar to this developer’s other series, Terra Lander, meaning simple line art for terrain and objects, black backgrounds with a starry field, some particle effects for explosions, and classical music in the background – this time, the all-too-appropriate Ride of the Valkyries. Overall, it’s decent, and fits well with the retro style of the game.

The gameplay here is good, if a bit simple. You have a button to shoot forward, and one to send bombs in an arc downward, and must dodge missiles that fire at you from the surface while destroying missile installations and fuel depots. This will all seem familiar to those who played Scramble, but it’s done well enough here.

Well… except for one thing. This game features a frustrating lack of checkpoints, meaning that if you mess up and take a hit toward the end of one of the game’s long levels, you’ll be forced to restart that level from the beginning.

Overall, I found Terra Bomber to be a solid if somewhat unambitious take on the classic Shmup it’s based on, but the lack of checkpoints in the game’s long levels combined with one-hit kills made me quickly get frustrated with this game. It’s one thing for a game to be punishing of mistakes, but this game takes it too far, and it kills the fun (along with the player).

tl;dr – Terra Bomber is a Shmup that’s clearly inspired by the 1981 arcade classic Scramble. And while this is mostly a solid game in that same vein, the long levels and lack of checkpoints make this far too tedious to recommend.

Grade: C-

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