Its small but unique charms bring it away from its repetitiveness

User Rating: 8.5 | Bomberman DS
Bomberman Ds is the classic old school bomberman many fans have come to know and love, but is it really worth another go? or does get to repetitive? It may be bomberman but its small and unique charms bring it away from its repetitiveness of the past.


Story 7/10: The story is quite simple, a large crystal shining at the highest point explodes and each shard lands in the different worlds. The nice clean environments from buildings to volcanos and even pyramids seem to be wrecked after the shards land. Its up to bomberman to restore the crystal. Its old school instantly but with no dialogue or reason for the crystal it just feels slightly unnecessary.

Gamplay 9/10: You will through 100 levels of bomb-exploding action.There numbered as in 1-1 or 1-5 or 2-3. Your goal is to kill all the enimes on the board and every 10th stage a boss. The stage layouts consist of enemies, blocks, Items, and an exit to complete the level. In the begining you will start off kinda slow or weak but as you blow up blocks, some will contian items that will increase the number of bombs you can lay, or your flame will spread out farther. Some of these get really unique like landmines or being able to kick your bomb or even wall though the blocks. All of these power you up but you dont have to use them right away. On the top screen is the level, on the bottom screen is a whole library of items. It shows each one and how many of that item you have picked up. Just tap with the stylus to apply the item or items of your choice. It becomes really fun as you can make a large variety of what items you will use for which levels and this is also useful to save the really good items for harder situations ( like a boss). The further you progess: the more eniemes will come, the more challenging they will be to kill, like all games it gets harder as you go but more fun too. Every 5 stages you run across a bonus stage. You must kill all the enemies and once you do you can to a room filled with upgrades. All of this is time limited but its surely helpful. After the bonus stage the game will save automatically. The game is capable of saving every 5 stages automatically. You can save in between through a quick save but once you resume it off the menu it will not be there again (unless you save again) otherwise you go back to either a ?-0 or after a ?-5 bonus stage. There is one big flaw that can happen, when you die you lose all your equipped power ups so you must re-apply power ups you had. This isnt good espically when you are using the last of one particluar item. The bigger problem is when you lose all your lifes get a GAME OVER. Not only do you lose your equipped items but all of them in your inventory as well. This becomes frustrating for the later part of the game but you earn enough experience from the previous levels so this should be a problem often.

Multiplayer 9/10: The multiplayer is extremely fun. You can gather up to 8 freinds with only one cartalidge and that is already a big plus. It allows those who have it to play and those who just wanna quick fight. The multiplayer offers a very large amount of variety. You can set up the game just as you like with number of lives, time limiet and even if you want computers. The stage variety is even better from you average board to weird gimicks like tredmills on the stage or some were items are already aquired
Example: one stage has your bomb-exploding rage already at maximum capacity.
The only 2 stages not recommended are the microphone stages, becasue they dont tell you what to say to make the bomb explode. ( Is it BOMB? or EXPLODE? or blowing into the microphone?)
The game play like story mode only this time your blowing up your freinds. Even after you die you can sit along the sidelines throwing bombs at surviving players. So even if you dont win, you can still play and have some fun.

Bomberman Ds is a great game and one that doesnt stray to far from the series's lovable formula. I can recommend this to either long time fans or newcomers because either way its alot of fun.