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Bomberman ’93 Review

Bomberman ’93 is a 1992 maze video game from the Bomberman series and published by Hudson Soft on the PC Engine. It is a pretty good, but far from great entry in the series.

Now I love the Bomberman series, but I wasn’t a huge fan of this early entry honestly. It is very flawed. Still pretty good and I give it a 4 rating, but that is a far cry from the best entries in the franchise. That is mostly because the game is too short and not particularly demanding and I am used to longer and more difficult gaming experiences so this one did not cut it for me.

Once again it consists of single-player and multiplayer modes. Let’s talk about single-player. It is the better of the two modes and the more difficult one naturally. I really liked it as a whole even if it wasn’t all that hard or long. It is pretty long, but shorter than most Bomberman campaigns from this period in the franchise’s history.

So it has eight worlds comprised of eight levels and the eighth one is basically a boss battle. Now most of these worlds are not extremely memorable, but they were all pretty well designed and fun to play. And also solidly diverse in both setting and level design. As for the bosses, they were the highlights as they were much more difficult than the normal levels. Actually, the whole final world was very difficult and very competent in its A.I. But the final boss himself was superb as he needed to be beaten thrice and with all the different methods and it was quite interesting and in the end rewarding to finish him off.

Bomberman ’93 has a pretty weak multiplayer. I guess I am too harsh to it as ‘Mega Bomberman’ spoiled me, but still this wasn’t up to par to the usually strong gameplay that the series provides. That is mostly because the A.I. opponents are just ridiculously easy to kill and thus you are much better off against the human opponents.

Another problem has to be that very annoying design to each of the areas. Now all of the areas have interesting, different settings and are well animated and I really liked them overall, but I thoroughly disliked those portal holes dispersed in each of the four angles on the screen. Those were only present in one area in ‘Mega Bomberman’, but here they are in every area and they get annoying pretty quickly.

Now I am constantly referencing ‘Mega Bomberman’ in this review and that’s because that’s my personal favorite of all video games. However, one aspect that this amazing game owes to Bomberman ’93 is the score. Yes, here we are first introduced to that iconic score in both the title screen as well as the multiplayer mode. Very catchy, classic and a lot of fun, it fits the game perfectly and is the best thing that this game provided for the entire franchise.

It is very well animated and its graphics is admittedly not great, but pretty good and especially the character designs were expectedly excellent and wonderfully cartoony. The game looks and sounds good, but its storyline is very weak, even weaker than the usual for the platformer genre and that was not a big, but a small problem for sure.

Bomberman ’93 is a pretty good, but not great installment in the Bomberman series. It has a slight story, a weaker multiplayer mode and it is too short and easy to beat, but it looks good, it is very fun to play, most of the worlds and levels are very good and the score is particularly strong and influential for the franchise.

My Rating – 4