Bombshell is an isometric shooter with some RPG elements developed by Interceptor Entertainment and published by 3D Realms. You take on the role of Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, a voluptious woman that loves to run around and kill aliens and give bad one-liners.
Bombshell (the main character if you hadn’t guessed) lost her right arm after an incident and now has a cybernetic arm that also doubles as her primary weapon. There is the Maxigun, a three-barreled gatling-type machine gun, but I ran out of ammo often. There’s also the Motherflakker, a magnetically-contained shotgun that became my go-to gun when the Maxigun ran out of ammo. I was unable to use the P.M.S. or Personal Missile System due to not finding it yet, but I found the name lacking a certain quality. My favorite weapon by far was the Bowling Bomb, Shelly’s trademark bombs with an automatic search function that allows the bombs to roll toward the closest enemy and explode on impact.
The controls were pretty straight-forward. The WASD keys move you up, down, left, right, or diagonally if you use two of the buttons in conjuction with each other. The mouse moves a cursor around and you always face the direction of it. The left mouse button fires the primary weapon function and the right mouse button fires the secondary weapon function. Q will use a medkit if you have one. C brings up your Interface that shows your Quests, Stats, Inventory, and Weapons. When you level up this is where you go to use your skill points in such categories as your Heatlh and Armor, as well as to upgrade and unlock abilities and to upgrade your weapons.
When you kill enemies they drop an intergalactic currency known as KY (clever, no?) which can be used at merchants to purchased ammo, medkits, etc. I did not spend too much time spending my KY because whilst traversing the maps you almost always find more ammo to replenish your guns.
I really tried to like this game, but it eventually became repetitive and boring. You continually run around to your objectives and continuously press the left mouse button to kill the deadly aliens. Some may like that, but the repetitiveness bored me. The story also seemed to be lacking. I am very big on story and I felt that I was thrown in the middle of a story without knowing how the story even began. On top of that the voice-acting was sub-par. The one-liners kind of made me chuckle, but after hearing them repeatedly I got tired of them. The enemies are challenging in groups, but if you run around in circles and shoot them you’ll mow them down in good time.
All in all, if you don’t mind continuously running around maps and shooting enemies then this game if for you. The graphics did not seem much to holler about and I could have been playing a game on the Xbox 360 or even the original Xbox, but, all in all, if you don’t mind continuously running around maps and shooting enemies then this game if for you.
Bombshell is available (on sale) right this second on Steam. You can purchase the standard edition for $34.99 ($31.49 on sale) or the deluxe edition that contains exclusive items for $39.99 ($35.19 on sale).
A big thanks to Gand over at Team Pixelated for this review of Bombshell!