[Typing]
Oh man, it's 2016 and a new 3D Realms game is out?
If you'd have told me this would happen back when we all thought they were shutting down in 2009,
I would not have believed it.
Of course, this is the new 3D Realms based in Denmark
since Interceptor Entertainment bought the brand in 2014.
But let's get to the game at hand.
Bombshell, developed by Interceptor and published by "3Denmark Realms" in 2016 for the PC.
These are the same folks that rebooted Rise of the Triad and were working on
Duke Nukem Reloaded before it was shut down.
Bombshell itself began as a Duke Nukem game as well,
Mass Destruction,
but it had to be reworked due to a lawsuit by Gearbox Software
who now owns the complete rights to the Duke Nukem IP.
Artifacts of this origin aren't hard to spot either,
with everything from the items ingame
to the game files themselves referencing Duke every which way.
But we don't have Duke!
Instead in Duke's place is Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison.
Previously intended as his sidekick, dating back to the early days of Duke Nukem Forever.
I have seen her referred to as Duchess Nukem, and while that's kind of clever,
the only notable similarity is that they both enjoy shooting aliens while spouting one-liners.
Instead of gun holsters, she's got a robot arm named Amiga that can talk to you
and transform into new guns and is also a turret sometimes because aliens!
Speaking of aliens, the game begins with a "Duke It Out in D.C." alien showdown at the White House,
with you taking orders from a dude that's totally not General Graves.
Seems the President's been kidnapped by an evil cyborg that's totally not Dr. Proton,
and I guess you're qualified to save the day.
It kind of throws you in head first,
barely touching on how Shelly lost her arm in the first place,
or why we should care about her story at all, come to think of it.
So, many of the plot developments later on fall flat.
But who cares about plot if the gameplay is amazing, right?
So what do you get?
Adequacy, my friend. Adequacy.
Bombshell may be billed as an isometric action RPG,
but after playing through it, that really doesn't make sense to me.
Don't get the idea that Bombshell is Diablo with guns or something
because unlike a game like Diablo,
it's fond of tunneling you down lots of linear corridors with few meaningful branching paths,
and there's also no skill trees, no side dungeons,
no hub towns, no co-op, no looting of random weapons or armor
and no visual character customization.
Although, you'd be forgiven for looking at the environments and
being reminded of Diablo or Torchlight or even Lord of the Rings.
Three-quarters of the locations seem better suited to a fantasy game, if you ask me.
And while several areas are admittedly gorgeous to look at,
most of it strikes me as generic and kind of out of place.
I was really hoping they'd revisit some more levels based on Earth
like the tutorial level at the White House, but nope.
The rest of the game is filled with "Stock Alien World Backdrop #9,"
followed by "Typical Ice World Backdrop #37,"
followed by, uhh...
This is getting boring.
Look! Here's a level of circles connected by drab corridors.
Here's an area filled with hundreds of identical hexagons
that float over annoying bottomless pits. Great!
And while the last couple levels are a little more interesting, I think,
there's still not a whole lot of valuable stuff to really do in there.
Every so often, you'll find a really short secondary objective to complete
but I never found one that was worth my time.
Usually these consist of a simple fetch quest
that will net you a paltry amount of XP, ammo and cash.
Combine this with the fact that
Bombshell's few one-liners get insanely repetitious by the end of the second level,
and I cast aside my normal practice of clearing each map and
instead just ran from point A to point B
to expedite the next level's arrival.
Okay, so the story is barely there and the levels are lacking,
so what about the combat and the role-playing elements?
Well, "passable" is a word that comes to mind.
You shoot, the enemies shoot back, there's a lot of shooting and it feels decent.
The execution moves are satisfying though.
At least, the first few times you use them,
since it really grinds the combat to a halt.
And yes, you slowly gain experience points for killing things,
which in turn unlocks a nominal set of improvements to kill more things.
Nothing really stands out about it for me.
It does what it needs to do and calls it a day.
There are a few token skills to unlock, like sliding shields and two forms of melee,
and the rest is the standard fare of upgrading things like health, stamina and armor.
The weapons are where most of the upgrades lie
and you steadily unlock weapons throughout the story.
Some of the later weapons definitely have a lot more kick than the starter ones,
especially once you start adding things like explosive rounds and alternate fire modes,
but none of them stand out to me
and each one simply performs its obvious role.
You know, shotgun thing, rocket launcher thing, whatever.
Granted, they've got silly names like the Motherflakker
and the Personal Missile System aka PMS,
but these corny jokes are no substitution for enjoyment when using these weapons.
That *oomph* factor isn't there for any of them to me,
and that's disappointing, considering how much you have to use them.
Even the Bowling Bombs, which act like smart spherical pipe bombs,
are a pain to use because of their tendency to wander around all over the place
and sometimes never connect with the enemy you want.
Some of this could be helped by having the ability to lock onto enemies,
or by including a camera that doesn't suck.
And yeah, ugh, the camera.
It's zoomed in *way* too close most of the time
meaning that enemies frequently shoot you from off-screen.
You *can* enable an optional peek mode in the Options menu, but
this has to be a joke, right?
Looking around with the mouse like this gives me an instant headache
and anytime you have to use a menu, it's unbelievable!
And while it's less twitchy when using a controller,
now you're stuck having to constantly hold the right thumbstick in the direction you want to look.
Then there's the fact that you can't save your game at any time
and instead have to rely on checkpoints, which isn't a huge problem
until you encounter the game's overall unstable nature.
In *one* full play-through, I had nine crashes to the desktop,
two cases of reaching a point in the story which couldn't be completed,
one crash of my entire PC and dozens of smaller physics glitches
and things like getting stuck in the ground.
[male voice, repeating] ''SHIELD ACTIVATED''
It's worth noting that I am playing this on pre-release codes
since 3D Realms sent me a copy for this review,
and they have since fixed the show-stopping bugs I had, so that's good.
But there's all the rest of it still,
and at this point, it's only days away from launch,
so I worry about the status for everyone else on Day One.
Augh. Man, this is a bummer.
Getting a game I had hopes for from a developer that I really respect and
then having to pick it apart is never fun.
So let's kill it with kindness for a few, shall we?
For one thing, the soundtrack rocks!
[badass rock music]
The theme song rocks, the loading screen music rocks and
while the background tracks while you're exploring are often predictable,
there are even a few of those that stand out,
like this one that reminds me of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
[pulsing, electronic music]
Another fun feature is the fact that it frequently references Duke Nukem and
classic Apogee games,
and as a huge fan of their legacy, I was quite happy.
Finding the skeletal remains of Commander Keen or
hearing about Duke from a GDF arms dealer was great.
And finally, may not have Duke in it,
but it did have the voice talents of Jon St. John,
which wins a thumbs up from me.
On the other hand, Bombshell's voice rarely has any discernible personality.
[Bombshell] "It's not difficult to see why Heskel turned against his own."
"He dedicated a lifetime to his ideas,"
"only to have them rejected in their moment of triumph."
Maybe it's supposed to be stoic, but it was a bit much.
And practically every grunt in the game that you run into sound like a guy
off the street speaking into a headset.
Crap! I was supposed to be saying nice things.
Ah, well, I tried.
But no matter which way I cut it, Bombshell is a game that
for every awesome thing it has going for it,
it lets me down with two more.
It leaves a good first impression, though. Those first couple levels are pretty fun.
And man, it's nice to shoot some evil aliens in a 3D Realms game again.
But it's a character-driven action game that seems to have forgotten the character part,
and instead just relies on action with no soul.
The 10-hour campaign was a real slog to get through,
and even though there's a New Game Plus mode,
I can't imagine ever giving it a shot.
Seeing as there are lots of similar games that do this kind of gameplay better,
I cannot recommend picking it up for the asking price of $35.
That said, I still look forward to seeing what the team at Interceptor comes up with next,
but for me, Bombshell was more ''bomb'' than, uh...
"shell."
B-Bombshell...
[synthesized music]
Well, that made me sad,
but you know, there's still the Build engine prequel that is
coming out sometime in the future. There's a beta that's available that I haven't played yet
because it didn't come with my early copy, but I will be getting that and I
will be covering that in the future, and that is a prequel to the Bombshell made in
the Build engine. That's such a cool thing to me.
I'm still excited about that. I hope that that's something worth playing.
We'll see once that comes around and is out of beta or whatever.
But yeah, that's all for this video today.
You can always check out some of these others here, if you would like to do so.
And, as always, thank you very much for watching.