Poor
Expecting a ten-player party game with offline multiplayer antics, dozens more bomb and power-up types, and a host of gigantic-headed critters? Then pick up a Sega Saturn and Saturn Bomberman instead. Bomberman: Act Zero, aside from an online mode, has far less to offer fans than the decade old and far superior versions, which appeared on consoles past. Bomberman: Act Zero more than fails to live up to the franchise: This is a dire, half-assed attempt to update an admittedly long-in-the-tooth game that falters on almost every level. This isn't just a bad game; this is a serious misstep for Hudson Soft. Actually, it's more of a trip, stagger, and plummet.
Making all the bombermen look like proto-Samus, badass cyborgs was perhaps not the wisest move. Coloring most of the environments with the same palette of "brown, dark brown and metallic" colors that id Software used with DOOM 3 won't win you any fans. In fact, it's possibly the worst videogame retooling since King of Fighters went 3D or Lara Croft went to Paris.
This Bomberman is a spluttering dud right from the very start. Konami and Hudson don't bother with any fancy logos spinning in CG space. The introduction to the game is around 20 seconds long and tells the story of a "future basement" (where "future gamers" pay "future rent" to their "future mothers," no doubt) with a metallic conveyor belt where bombermen are thrust from goo-filled coffins, blasted one of eight different colors and their sex determined. Obviously, a super-deformed, cute cartoon fellow with sphere-hands and explosive defecation problems isn't going to win over the kids with an Xbox 360. Right? No, 360 owners need metallic cyborg robots with glowing nuclear hearts and alarmingly tight spandex butts. That's the bomberman avatar for 2006.
From Hero to Act Zero
If you're playing this game alone, God help you, but you have more options than playing the game with friends. You can choose from "Single Battle Standard" and "FPB." Standard mode is the same Bomberman game you've played countless times before, but harking back to gameplay straight from the Nintendo Entertainment System. That is to say, you've 100 stages, each looking remarkably similar, and featuring enemies and items in different places. Crisscrossing corridors interspersed with blocks you remove by bomb-placing, the object is to catch a foe by trapping them and killing them with one of your bombs. The only difference with this mode is that when you die (and you have one life), you start from stage 1. That's right; make one single mistake and you must begin again.
