Super Bomberman R 2
This was originally posted on the 17th of September, 2023, in this Twitter thread.
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| Konami |
To start, I guess I'll talk about the biggest annoyance, the cut content. There are quite a few characters and stages, a ton of hats, and even some modes and settings from the first game that didn't make it into this one. The cut modes especially strike me as odd. The Civilians and Checkpoints Grand Prix modes, along with Standard Team Battles are all gone.
On the bright side though, there's still a lot of old and new content that's pretty fun.
Talking about something "old" first, for Standard Battles it's neat that you can now have up to 16 players, although I think you need to play online in order to play with more than 8 humans.
For the Grand Prix modes, Perfects were changed. Getting a Perfect grants your team a crown, rather than points, and that crown is worth more than any number value, I believe. I'm not the biggest fan of the crowns since they completely overshadow points whenever a team gets one.
The window to initiate a Draw has been reduced, which I greatly appreciate. Honestly, one of my biggest problems with the first game was that Draws happened too often.
There's also a new option that disables both Revenge Carts, and Bombs teleporting across the edges of the map for the first 30 seconds. 30 seconds is a little long for my taste though, and there's no in-between options which is unfortunate.
For some reason the ability to remach in offline matches has been removed which is pretty annoying since it takes like a minute of loading screens and menus to get back into a match. (Update: This was fixed in version 1.3.0)
Green Louies are a nice addition, although I wish there were more than just green ones.
The Battle 64 mode is pretty fun. It gets pretty repetitive pretty fast though since the game isn't very populated, so you're fighting mostly bots all the time.
You may not like it, but this is what peak Bomberman looks like.
The new Castle mode is a ton of fun. Honestly, it's a lot better balanced than l expected. Not to say it's necessarily well balanced though. You kinda have to gamble on the character select screen. It's extremely odd to me how the Attack team isn't actually on a team, although I guess if they were all cooperating then that could really throw off the balance.
The way Online and Offline Level Builder menus are separated is pretty cumbersome. It reminds me a bit of how the Standard and Grand Prix menus from the first game were separated, but a lot more confusing.
The shop's prices are much more reasonable in this game compared to the first. In SBR2 a bundle of 8 hats costs 300 gems, while in SBR1 some hats on their own costed up to 10,000 gems each.
The ranked (or as the game calls it, Graded) system is still not great. I believe it's different than the first game, although still, as much as I like being Grandmaster, someone of my skill level probably shouldn't be at Grandmaster.
The addition of online bots also helps the matchmaking go by much faster. (Update: It's not mentioned in the patch notes, but at some point I'm pretty sure the devs made it so that you can't play Graded matches without at least one other person, which too be fair theoretically ensures Graded matches are competitive,
especially since the bots aren't very smart,
but when combined with the fact that you get kicked out of matchmaking for waiting too long, makes the matchmaking way more cumbersome which completely guts your chances of finding matches.)
I should also mention that SBR2's netcode is way better than SBR1. I'm not a netcode expert, but I believe SBR1 just used peer to peer, delay based netcode, while SBR2 uses server connections, and something that isn't just delay based netcode. All these changes (not including the updates) led to me having a ton of fun with the online this time around.
I've experienced a few bugs here and there, although nothing has been too game ruining. The main ones are Grade icons bugging out and becoming white squares, and the game randomly crashing sometimes when going through certain menus. (Update: If I remember correctly, most if not all the bugs I've encountered have been patched out. The patch notes don't have a list of bug fixes, so I'm not entirely sure.)
In general though, this game's framerate is pretty noticably worse than SBR1, which isn't a deal breaker for me, but is a noticeable step down regardless. It also occasionally stutters which can get really annoying.
Lasty, I guess I'll talk about the Story mode. For the actual plot, while still don't particularly care too much about the main characters, I think the main villain Fusell was interesting.
As for the gameplay, I think it's a lot of fun. The structure was really shook up compared to SBR1. I think the level up system worked really well as a replacement for traditional Bomberman powerups. It's much less difficult than SBR1, or frankly most Bomberman games, but I didn't really mind. I remember having a pretty rough time with SBR1's story mode back when it came out since wasn't very good at Bomberman, so I can see why they made this game easier. It's unfortunate though that you're stuck playing as White Bomberman, and that there's no co-op.
Overall I feel like this game was a lot of 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. But hey, that's still forward in the end. 👍
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