Other than rare fun on the weekends, and logic skill-building, there's not much to like in Bomberman: Act Zero.
---
+Announcer sounds kinda cool.
+New future theme is alot better than the lame cartoon theme.
+Passible Metal music.
+Graphics are slightly passible.
+FPS bomberman is a good addition.
+Ability to create your own room.
+Bomberwomen are occasionally attractive.
-Shallow gameplay.
-No offline multiplayer.
-No lives, saves, or checkpoints.
-Weak custom character creation.
-Online is completly empty.
-Most powerups stripped away.
---
Act Zero is EXACTLY what this game is: zero.
Ok, fine, maybe it is fun for weekends, but when you rack up for the scores on which one is the worst game ever in your collection, Bomberman Act zero comes mighty close. Not that Bomberman has been a fairly good series, but fans will be brought to tears at the sight of this game, and newcomers will stray away.
The first thing you will notice is that Bomberman has changed totally. Somewhere between the time you looked at the box, and the time where you turned off your 360 consle in fusteration, you'll notice the cartoony style has been replaced with cyber-future darkness. Instead of bright, colorful bubble head bomberman, you get black, ink-covered human with colored armor brutally nailed into their flesh. You are one of these poor souls. Your trapped, along with the other miserble cyberhumans in a large testing lab where horriying medical experiments are performed on humans. Your memory stripped from you, you have your only nature instinct: Escape. As a cyborg, you plan to reach the top of the testing lab your trapped in to escape. You do so by fighting through 99 bomberman-gameplay styled levels. The levels are all large research labs with metal blocks littered with them to make it like a classic bomberman maze. All the levels look pretty dark, and only change 1 or 2 different textures every once in a while. See, that's already a mildly lame story, and its even lamer by the fact that "your so cold, you don't remember who you are" and the rest of that emo stuff Hudson crammed in the instruction booklet. Hudson doesn't tell why fighting 99 other cyborgs is gonna help you escape. Still, its better than the pointless, cartoon bobble-headed freaks.
The whole point of the game is simple; Drop some bombs to trap your opponent in a bunch of blocks til he gets in the crossfire, or gets crushed by a giant block falling from the sky (when time almost runs out, sudden death is falling blocks fall down, crushing anybody in their path). Two gamemodes are included: Standard and FPB (First Person Bomberman). Appearantly, Hudson didn't know what first-person was, so instead you get a close up view of Bomberman in FPB, and an overhead view in Standard. There isn't even an option for offline multiplayer, which sounds completly rediculous, coming from an old-school party game. Another outrageous thing is that there are no saves or checkpoints whatsoever in the game. And there are 99 levels. So, for instance, your on the 97th level and you slip up and die, you will have to start all over again from level 1. Rivetingly horrendous.
The game features an online mode however, and unless your connected to xbox live, you are unable to save your stats or anything. They just instantly die the minute you hit the power. And absoulutly nobody is online, so you probably won't use the online mode much at all.
Bomberman: Act Zero features a CAGE mode as well. That's where you choose either a poor male or female soul and torture him by implanting armor onto him or her. Basically, its a create-a-bomberman. Its features are limited to choosing male or female models, and selecting 9 colors for the armor. That's it. And, like I said before, if you aren't connected to live, it'll disapear when you shut the game off. Although the female models can be extremly attractive, it still feels weak in general.
The graphics look like an early generation xbox game, and they look alot better than most modern 360 games today. The sound has a few bombs exploding, and a female robot voice telling you when you've won a match, but other than that, there's not too much quaking. The music features some generic dark, future scary music, metal music, and the annoying online menu rock music, but only one or two of the tracks are worth listening to.
I'm not a big fan of bomberman at all, and even at one of the best in series, Hudson makes YET another crapish product. Other than rare fun on the weekends, and some mind-improving, Bomberman: Act Zero is...well, zero. It isn't even worth renting. Due to the lack of saves, you won't survive long enough to get the acheivements. Pretty much everything in the game is stated in the review. And that's why this wall of text is so short. All you need to know is that even though the game is occasionally good, its not good enough to glance at.
Nice going, Hudson.