Dud Nukem
“It’s so hard to believe this is real. It’s like a video game or something.” A random soldier told me this in Bombshell and it’s not the worst meta dialogue in the game. Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison is quick to complain about video game contrivances like needing to search for six strewn about crystals to open a door, or constantly needing to find control panels and hit buttons to drop far off laser walls.
Having the protagonist complain about boring game design doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Bombshell (PC)
Developer: Interceptor Entertainment
Publisher: 3D Realms
Released: January 29, 2016
MSRP: $34.99
The most surprising thing about this 2016 heir to the Duke Nukem throne is how toothless it is. The Duke’s puerile shtick is beyond dated as 2011’s tragedy Duke Nukem Forever might remind us, but save for a rocket launcher called the “PMS” — haha, menstruation! — Bombshell is tonally distinct, and instead goes for a nerfed “ooh rah” à la Independence Day. It even opens with a Fourth of July alien invasion of the White House and kidnapped president (whose American flag eye patch is, admittedly, hilarious).
The result is a milquetoast lead whose repeated, constant combat barks like, “I never thought aliens would land on the White House lawn” or “You’re not worth the metal you’re made of” or “Die, alien scum” do disservice to a solid acting performance. Making an old-school, character-led action game with a boring character is a huge misstep. In the opening cutscene, Shelly’s jeep is blown up. It’s on screen and blown up in a few seconds. There are two combat barks devoted to complaining about her lost car and they’re totally unearned. I forgot there even was a car until roughly the 25th mention.
At one point an enemy must’ve fallen off the map without dying because I had to hear his robotic droning about his shield every five seconds for the next 45 minutes.
In addition to being boring, Bombshell is a bit broken. I fell through the level and died three times. Shelly got stuck in place on a couple occasions, necessitating a restart to accompany the countless times she hitched on the environment. Enemies get stuck, too, or at least some choose to lay down arms and not attack until I kill them, anyway. Sometimes the map, which is uncovered as you explore, completely erases itself and leaves you with no sense of direction.
The latter was far more annoying than I thought it could be, especially given that it was coupled with archaic level design. There are three distinct areas in Bombshell, including an ice stage, because this is a video game, and they’re all designed like someone cracked a sheet of glass and traced the sprawling result. There are constant dead ends, fetch quests, and side quests that actually require backtracking to turn in. The mini-map, on the other hand, is incredibly useful because the camera is kept so tight that you will regularly run face-first into bullets if you navigate by watching Shelly move rather than watching the blips on the mini-map. Apparently fixed isometric perspective shooters were also missing a huge thing all these years: platforming.
Most of my deaths came after falling into a pool of water or after walking over a nonsensical hole in the ground like some Wile E. Coyote shit, like the architect of the alien home world had a debilitating Swiss cheese fetish. But it isn’t just that there is platforming, it’s that it is floaty and unsatisfying. One of the reasons Shelly’s lines bomb (besides that they’re vacuous and repeated a hundred times) is that they’re so disconnected from the character in the isometric view, and similarly there isn’t anything to ground or give weight to her jumps. Even her walking animation is like a hockey puck on ice.
That missing weight is a big part of why Bombshell‘s most redeeming factors, the twin-stick-style shooting, also falls flat. The weapons (rapid-fire machine gun, shotgun, flamethrower, and so on) have little stopping power. Enemies don’t seem to react when shot, but instead absorb bullets like sponges until their HP empties and they limply rag doll to the floor. The first two worlds accost you with loads of pain-in-the-ass tiny enemies that poison (damage over time) or freeze you (slow movement speed) while the last just goes full bore and sends out six Gundam-sized robots at a time. I appreciated being able to see them more clearly than the ankle-biters, but seeing giant robot after giant robot go weak in the knees after getting hit with a laser beam was almost pathetic. Also, the last level theme (it goes alien, ice, metal) looks exactly like the end of Mass Effect 2 down to the Terminator-cribbed robots.
Which reminds: Bombshell has some of the worst boss fights I have ever played. Sticking to conventions, they tend to be of the three-phase fare and toss regular enemies into the mix to make things more difficult. By the last form of the first boss I was out of ammo save for Shelly’s default, infinite-ammo weapon. I beat it by standing pissing distance in front of the boss and holding the trigger for a few minutes while scrolling through Twitter. The same thing happened with the boss of the ice world, which decided it just wasn’t interested in attacking me during its final phase.
Every once in a while, during a taut firefight that actually necessitates mixing and matching weapons (the shotgun alt fire, a stun gun, is possibly too useful), there are glimpses of a solid shooter let down by everything else around it. As it stands, playing Bombshell for more than an hour at a time is like ingesting a sedative, save for flashes of rage as you fall through the map one more time or are asked to find six more crystals.
[This review is based on a build of the game provided by the publisher.]
