The spiritual Duchess of Nukem makes her debut in a mostly competent, lite action-RPG.
By TJ Hafer
Bombshell throws you face-first into an absurd sci-fi quest to save the President of the United States, fronted by a gritty, ex-military, hardass alien hunter sporting a metal arm and prominent cleavage. It plays out exactly how that premise would lead you to expect. Coming from the publishers of Duke Nukem and the developers of 2013’s Rise of the Triad reboot, it drips exactly the same kind of dudebro (or dude-sis, in this case?) self-aware ridiculousness as a Duke or a Serious Sam game. It makes no apologies for its story’s shortcomings, preferring to focus on letting you atomize extraterrestrials in a variety of over-the-top ways.
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Watch the launch trailer above.
While Bombshell is billed as an action RPG, the way you move and fight as Shelly has much more in common with twin-stick shooters than with Diablo. And the sticks are the way to go; I had a much better time after abandoning the barely workable mouse/keyboard controls and plugging in my trusty 360 pad to maneuver the tough-as-nails heroine through planet after enemy-filled planet.
The only thing that breaks the flow of combat are the scripted execution moves.
Movement and shooting feel fluid and responsive, so even certain levels that tried to do their best impression of a platformer (a proposition that could have easily ended in disaster) were kept from feeling outright irritating by a competent jump button and good collision detection. The only thing that breaks that flow are the scripted execution moves that’re available on some enemies. When initiated, they freeze the controls, zoom in, and force you to wait several seconds for a gory fatality animation to play out. I stopped using them altogether only a few levels in.
Actual RPG mechanics are thin on the ground, at least in terms of their impact on combat. You can upgrade a few boring stats like health and armor, as well as modify weapons in simple, unexciting ways. It wasn’t until the late game – about 12 hours into the 15-hour campaign – that I felt these upgrades were having a real impact, because the enemies’ health and damage scale up faster than your firepower and survivability does.
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Unlocking a new type of gun felt like much more of a game-changer than incrementally improving the stuff I already had. From staples like the rocket launcher, shotgun, and flamethrower to a frighteningly potent death laser, each armament is very different from the last and has a tactical niche against certain enemy types. Bigger brutes tend to go down faster to the full-auto “maxigun”, swarms of little guys are vulnerable to explosives, and medium-sized groups of mid-tier enemies are best dealt with by spraying napalm and letting the ongoing fire damage do most of the work. Selectable “sidegrade” alt-fire modes gave me at least a small sense of character customization, such as turning my laser rifle into a continuous fan of lightning that would make Emperor Palpatine proud.
Jokes seem like they were chosen based on how many people in the writers’ room groaned.
Shelly, or “Bombshell” herself is as absurd an action-movie stereotype as you’ll find in the storied history of shooter protagonists. She delivers line after line with the utmost earnestness, and most seem like they were chosen based on how many people in the writers’ room groaned at them during a pitch meeting. When rescuing the President of the United States (a young blonde woman with an eyepatch who herself, at one point, attempts to garrote an alien with a severed spinal cord), Shelly declares without a drop of irony, “It’s time to paint this White House red!” Among her regular (and annoyingly repetitive, by the end) catchphrases are gems like “How many aliens does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Hehe… none. They’re all dead!” I ultimately enjoyed this attitude, even though it lacked the witty edge and cleverness of something like Saints Row IV, which pulls off essentially the same schtick in a much more clever and less predictable way.
The environments I explored, fought through, and left craters in were a major highlight. Shelly visits three distinct alien worlds that complement the carnage with gorgeous vistas, strong personality, interesting elements of verticality for a top-down game, and uncommon attention to detail. The enemies that populate each area are also overflowing with in-your-face visual elements and stylistic flair. My personal favorite was a race of space-zombie ice vikings (yes, all four of those descriptors are completely true), living on a frigid world that managed to be both whimsically bright and menacingly sepulchral at the same time.
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Doing battle with these enemies can be a lot of fun, but it’s not without some stumbling blocks. The scarcity of ammo means that, even if I played conservatively, I usually didn’t have the option to use the best gun for a given situation — which was irritating, considering how specialized most of them are. Trying to deal with heavily-armored alien lieutenants when all you have left is a spread-firing flak gun is an exercise in ballistic frustration. I was usually stuck with whichever boomstick I had bullets left for, and was all too often restricted to the weak, infinite-use ion cannon because I was out of ammo for everything else. This contributed to the Normal difficulty’s tendency to spike dramatically, while otherwise hovering just above what I’d describe as “cake walk” for the most part.
Weakest of all are the boss battles, which often eat all the ammo for your decent guns and leave you with a whole phase of the fight left to finish, plinking away with ion shots long enough that the protagonist herself actually starts commenting on how long you’re taking to kill the behemoth before you. Nearly every boss can be whittled away with exploits like getting them hung up on the geometry (something I was not actively trying to do, but ended up happening anyway). That actually became necessary for me to progress in one case, due to the aforementioned ammo scarcity issue.
The bosses are very cool looking, though, from an alien leviathan that looks like a sandworm from Dune after listening to a lot of Iron Maiden, to an ancient, necromantic barbarian giant that looks like one of the draugr from Skyrim after listening to a lot of Iron Maiden. Their mechanics are also diverse enough that I didn’t feel like I was fighting the same, hulking, insane sack of hit points twice. The aforementioned worm is stationary, forcing you to move around a platform and avoid its attacks, while the final boss is extremely mobile and engages you in an arena that borders on bullet-hell levels of environmental hazard.
Bombshell is a fast-paced, energetic, deliberately absurd action shooter that’s mostly competent at everything it tries to do. Stunningly crafted, downright epic environments and tight, responsive gamepad controls steal the show. But it certainly doesn’t pull off anything innovative or revolutionary, and the whole experience is dragged down by spiky difficulty, half-baked RPG mechanics, and poorly constructed (though varied) boss battles.
