Bomberman was one of my favorite couch multiplayer games when I was younger. My friends and I would sit for hours playing on the Nintendo 64. Super Bomberman R is an online multiplayer version of this on a much grander scale. Did it speak to my inner child? Reviewed on Google Stadia.

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Super Bomberman R is an interesting and fun game and held my attention for a lot longer than I was expecting. You get thrown right into the craziness of the game. There is no tutorial or handholding, just figure it out. Something that doesn’t get done enough but in my opinion makes the experience more rewarding when it all starts to click for you.

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The first thing that stuck out to me was the variety of characters to choose from. Some reminding me of the Bomberman of my childhood and others just crazy fun mash ups as seen in the screenshot below.

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Once you’re in the game, it’s a Bomberman battle royale. Battle royale, two words that become my video game weakness. Two words that can easily start an obsession for me in a video game. It started to do that to me but in the end, it just didn’t have the staying power and the matches started to lose the novelty after hitting the double digit mark in hours.

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It’s a 64 player battle royale and it has a very fun and unique way to go about the map getting smaller and bringing people together. The map is broken up into small battle arenas which look exactly how I remember them looking as a kid. There are paths in these areas to move to a different arena. There is a phase where you can no longer attack and you have to find an arena that is remaining opening. It makes for some frantic decisions as you are trying to find a good arena to go into. If that wasn’t enough you will see shadows of boxes that are going to be falling down so you have to try not to box yourself in an area that will lead to your death.

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You also have more than one life in this game so mistakes are easily forgiven and forgotten. Most of the time I’m happy about this, but when it doesn’t work in my favor I have an internal argument with myself saying I wish the game was a true battle royale and had only one life.

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Something that was hard for me to get used to and really get a grasp on was the way you attack with bombs. Playing Bomberman 64, which was really my only point of reference before this, every bomber had the ability to both kick and throw bombs. In this game, you have to destroy boxes to find different power ups and those abilities are among them. At first, I was not a fan of this mechanic, but once I started to really think about it and compared it to other battle royale games, it made sense to me. When you play Warzone, everyone is not going to be running around with the same gun so why should everyone be running around with the same abilities.

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There are a lot of unlockable characters and cosmetics that you will get organically just by playing the game. They are always dangling that carrot on the end of the stick to get you to jump right back into another match.

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Verdict

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Super Bomberman R is a great battle royale game and a fun game to jump into when you just need a quick match of something. Ultimately the novelty wears thin as you start to play for more hours but I don’t regret any of the hours I spent playing. I wish it had more staying power but for me, this game is still something I will recommend. It’s part of the Stadia Pro subscription so the expense is very low to jump in.

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Final Score 6.5/10