This arrived yesterday. Played it for about an hour in “traditional” mode – the same Bomberman game in multiplayer since the dawn of time. And in this respect, it is very good. It’s missing some of the more recent (well, 15 year old…) additions like throwing bombs and things to ride on, but it has all the required power-ups and plays as well as it ever did.
There are a few different modes, such as Star Mode where when you die you respawn but lose stars, which are scattered across the play area for all to collect. The winner is the person with the most when the time runs out. Then there’s Points Mode, where you get points for killing others and lose points for killing yourself. There’s also a “Wii” mode, which consists of no Bombermen at all, just pointers on the screen where you shoot bombs. It sort of works, but is a bit confusing.
After playing that, I played single player Story Mode. There’s a lot of chatting and cutscenes (unskippable, and the captions can’t be sped up either – gah!), and it seems to consist of a load of mini-games rather than any Bomberman style action. It’s very odd. You buy goes in these games with tokens, then gain “pieces” depending on how well you do. Once your tokens are all used up, your won pieces are tallied and you’re ranked against the other contestants on a leaderboard – come first and you’re promoted up to the next tier of games. I didn’t come first. Rubbish.