Bomb Chicken got us eggcited pretty much straight away with an eggstremely henticing trailer featuring an adorable chubby chicken blasting his way through a brightly coloured 2D pixel art world. We were full of henthusiasm, hoping the game would be as henjoyable, hengaging and hentertaining as the promo material suggested. So just for the shell of it, let’s chick it out to see if the hentire game can live up to its clucking wonderful promo material…
As you can see from that opening paragraph, it’s easy to get a semi-amusing idea that might seem like a good idea at first, but too much repetition completely obliterates any sense of fun within seconds, and that seems to be what’s happened with Bomb Chicken. Our feathered friend has no abilities to speak of, other than laying bombs which can be stacked vertically and/or kicked in a straight line across the screen. He (or she?) can’t run, can’t fly (not even a Yoshi-style flap/hover, like what you see chickens doing in real life), and there are no upgrades unless you count the chance to buy the occasional bit of extra health if you can be bothered to collect enough blue gems scattered around each level. This lack of variety means that there’s very little scope for creativity.
You’d sort of expect a puzzle platformer to tax the brain cells at least a little bit, but when every problem can be solved by either stacking or kicking bombs, making your way through each of the game’s 29 levels is an absolute breeze. Occasional levels might task players with laying and kicking bombs at the right time to bounce into trampolines and explode in the correct place, but that’s really as “tricky” as it gets. The gameplay on offer here is, unfortunately, rather poultry indeed.
While the gameplay falters, the visuals are pretty great and really are the saving grace of the overall package. The environments are kind of samey, but the chicken looks adorable as he/she waddles and bounces along and the enemies you encounter all have a bit of personality to them. The same can’t be said of the soundtrack though, which might be serviceable enough but is completely forgettable.
Bomb Chicken‘s gimmick feels like it should be one of a wider range of abilities in a much larger game, rather than its own self-contained adventure. There just isn’t enough here to remain compelling through even the shortest of adventures, and completing the game somehow feels like a chore despite it only taking around 90 minutes to finish. It isn’t clucking awful, but a difficult one to recommend for veterans of the genre.
BOMB CHICKEN / DEVELOPER: NITROME INC / PUBLISHER: NITROME INC / PLATFORM: PC, SWITCH (REVIEWED) / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
