Reviews from

in the past


On the fence with this one, but there's just enough wackiness with this game's expectations that I like it. It's got a bit of adventure, action, arcade kinda crammed together... weird rhythms of risking your candle resources in order to scrounge around a cave for other resources.

Wondering if you should spend your blow-up-all-blocks powerups to uncover other powerups.

The weird scramble to equip your life float, float on water and bomb what you think might be a wall to let you get out of the water safely.

The various level shapes and layouts, even if they start to texturally feel really similar (bomb, wait, get hit by impossible to dodge tiny bullet, bomb, wait, bomb, wait...). There's a kind of ambiguous risk-reward that's both mushy but kind of pleasing to try and brute force through.

The 'lore' suggested by the flow of these levels is strange. It almost feels like the game really wanted to accurately follow a story and so it goes for the less approachable level design. Some levels are entirely dark, you must navigate them by using your limited candles (or a rare lantern.) Many levels are trapped in unsignalled infinite loops, until you find a holy grail under a tile - usually not in any kind of intuitive place. It's arbitrary, it feels like maybe this RoboWarrior isn't meant to save whatever hell world they've visited. What makes the enemies all drop the same bombs you use? Why is the RoboWarrior doomed to not climb over the obstacles? Who created such bombable-block-thick worlds? Why is the world overrun with these creepy robot and slime things? Why are there hidden rooms full of old statues that drop power ups? Why are so many sewers full of power ups? Why are some seemingly-unbreakable walls actually bombable - but only if bombed 5 times? Somehow this game makes me think about the material science of its world.

The game makes little attempt at explaining any of this, but there's some kind of raw narrative power floating about that is hard to not respect. Especially so after reading a GameFAQs FAQ that had one-line descriptions of the games' levels. Were they official lines from the manual? Or made up by the FAQ author? Who knows...

Well, this one was real rough at the start, not knowing what anything did, and dying to one explosion or powerful enemy hit, and having the first level loop infinitely until you find a specific item under a specific tree and also hiding the level end key under another specific tree. But over the course of a few days I got better at the game and learned how to progress, and then honestly, the game wasn't that hard. It was kinda fun even!

There definitely are some issues with the game though. The aforementioned item under a specific tree makes the game really tedious, blowing up every single object until you find it. Some of the later levels get pretty rough to navigate through, just cause there are walls you need to blow up that take multiple bombs. And then if you run out of bombs, it becomes REALLY tedious. And while the music is really nice and well made... I kinda wish there were more tracks. The main theme played for like, 80% of my playtime.

The majority of the game that isn't tedious is decent though. Playing around with the wide variety of powerups was really nice and added some good strategy to the game, and it was really satisfying finding some stairs and collecting a ton of powerups & bombs. Also the way the game works makes it uncommon for you to run out of bombs or powerups unless you're being reckless with them, so I rarely felt like I wasn't well equipped. And the constantly draining health wasn't actually that much of a nuisance. I never really had a shortage of the health item, and it warns you when you're getting low on health at a pretty safe distance, and even with getting hit by weak attacks all the time, it didn't drain all that quickly at all.

Anyways, I don't think I'd recommend this game randomly to just anyone, but if you're looking for something new to play on the NES/Famicom, you could do a LOT worse than this. This game is pretty alright.

The Bomberman inspiration here is clear, and it's a sham they didn't figure out how to really advance the formula much. I hated the underground levels because they just felt like time wasters that you had to deal with to collect weapons for the rest of the very repetitive game.

i cnant belie/ve what i[ve dioone i;m so fuckign sorry evrryone.../// i just wnanted save!! thje wlorld with bbomb. but I fgucked uuppp and blowew mysheldf up with myy own exploxision. im such idkiot im sorryyyyy