Game Details Developer: Interceptor

Publisher: 3D Realms

Platform: Windows, PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: January 29, 2016

Price: $35

Links: Steam | Twitter Interceptor: 3D Realms: Windows, PS4, Xbox OneJanuary 29, 2016: $35

In Bombshell, the new isometric shooter from Interceptor Entertainment and 3D Realms, there is a shield. I know this with 100 percent certainty, because for the last third of my playthrough, every step, action, and breath I took was punctuated by a robotic voice intoning "shield activated."

That’s not because I was spamming my character's comically overpowered bubble shield (though I did plenty of that), but it resulted from what I assume was a bug. I say "assume" because I'm not entirely sure that Bombshell hadn't grown sentient and developed just a bit of malice toward me. The game seems sapient enough to at least realize what a repetitive drag it had been up to that point, so maybe it turned its newborn ability to think and feel entirely toward mocking my efforts to find the fastest path to the credits.

Bombshell isn't an aggressively terrible game. It's just aggressively mediocre for long enough that it starts to seem that way.

Half and half and less than either

A lot of my frustration can be attributed to the fact that Bombshell takes what's basically a pretty decent set of top-down shooter mechanics and does nothing with them for eight solid hours. That’s eight hours of hiking through backtrack country (or backtracking through hiking country) hunting down keys, turning off force fields, or collecting keys that turn off force fields. Occasionally a boss fight will rear its head to waste the potential of a decent character design, but besides that you basically know what each and every level of Bombshell contains.

That's Bombshell the game, of course. Not Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison, Bionic Commando cosplayer and our cybernetic protagonist. Shelly—literally referred to as Bombshell by the majority of the cast—is actually one of her namesake's brighter points, thanks in large part to the strength of Valerie Arem, the heroine's voice actress. Arem brings it, selling the various attitudes and bizarre characterization through which the script drags her character.

A former colonel, Bombshell lost her right arm, and the rest of her squad at the time, in a bombing. The culprit was a cybernetic terrorist that, by the time of Bombshell's start, has teamed up with a bunch of equally cybernetic aliens. Together they kidnap the president for no good reason, and Shelly sets out to save her.

Yeah, it's one of those kinds of video game stories.























In the moment-to-moment, Shelly seems believable (again, thanks to a solid cadence). Over time, however, there just isn't any rhythm to her personality. Shelly is, at different times, depicted as both smartass super-soldier and serious survivor. Neither of these two identities feels particularly well-resolved with the other. Bombshell (which actually began its development as a Duke Nukem project) seems more at home simply being silly: the president's stars-and-stripes eye patch and the endlessly over-the-top one-liners speak to that. Harrison, though, is presented with a spread of bland melodrama surrounding her character that seems overly sincere for her surrounding game.

These disparate tones never clasp hands, nor at any point do they reach far enough in either direction to pull apart from each other (that damned eye patch almost feels like the eleventh-hour addition of some artist or marketer worried that players would take them too seriously). It almost feels like the developers assumed that a "strong female character" needs a traumatic past to be taken deadly serious.

Open a door, shoot some more

The same lack of cohesive rhythm applies to the action. Harrison's bionic arm serves as both a weapon and companion (her name is Amiga). As a weapon, the arm can hot-swap between the usual fare: a minigun (“hilariously” called the "Maxigun"), a shotgun, rocket launcher, flamethrower, and the aforementioned automatic. The late-game sees a few slightly more outlandish additions, but nothing too hard to wrap our shooter-warped minds around.

You'll rarely run out of ammo for any of them, either, but it's not for a lack of effort on the developer's part. Enemies start tough and only get more bullet-spongy over time. It's here that the real tedium sets in.

Combat simply doesn't flow. You pump bullet after bullet into the same dozen enemies, listening to the same half-dozen one-liner barks from Shelly, across the same three tile sets. There's no combo to maintain or benefit to playing better, just the promise of more bullets and bombs to throw their way. You'll level up and enhance your equipment over time, but enemy hides are so tough it never feels as if you, the player, are improving your skills. Instead, you toy around to find which weapon or ability will simply let you move the hell on to the next set of crystal keys faster.

In comes the shield: a mid-game bubble of hot death that, for reasons I can't explain, seems to do more damage to surrounding enemies than any of the actual guns. The shield also stuns enemies, recharges quickly and infinitely, hits all surrounding enemies, and makes Shelly practically invincible. Thus, the last three hours of my time in Bombshell were spent running past and scraping up against alien armies, occasionally throwing out shots to burn them down that much faster.

That's a balance issue that could be patched out later, of course, but it's a symbol of the greater issue. I wanted to be done with Bombshell as fast as possible, and I was willing to become a genocidal hamster ball to do it.

And on that bombshell...

Bombshell shows a worrying lack of polish in spots. The UI is often too small to hold all of its own information. Sometimes my health bar just outright lied to me. It's often unclear which gaping holes in the ground are part of a texture and which will instantly kill you if you fall through them.

In fairness, Interceptor seems to be aware of some of these issues. The company patched the game ceaselessly during the pre-release period while I was writing my review. Still, this close to release, it’s troublesome that I had to listen to a robotic voice trip over itself to constantly tell me my shield was activated.

Bombshell is much too thin to support the amount of game its developers have built (though not that it's even that long to begin with). There are bright spots. The shooting itself has a pleasant impact to it, at least in very short bursts. Shelly and Amiga have, if not outright chemistry, at least an amiability that felt endearing. All the more shame then when their camaraderie comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt.

None of this remotely makes up for the rest of Bombshell, however. The other 95 percent is still a bog-standard, top-down shooter (whatever that means in 2016) and not a very sturdy one at that.

The good:

The shooting is at least fairly passable.

I don't hate Shelly.

The bad:

Endlessly repeating encounters and mission design.

It never knows what tone it wants to strike, and the characters suffer for it.

Plenty of bugs to drive you up the wall.

The ugly:

"Shield activated."

Bottom line: A game that feels half-done in every respect. Skip it.