MNGOVR’s new title for HTC Vive is a wildly colourful and fantastically fun PVP title which seemingly draws inspiration from the Hudson Soft classic Bomberman and is at once wonderfully simple and frantically addictive.
Bomberman from Hudson Soft represented some of the purest forms of multiplayer bliss throughout its many iterations and variations spanning multiple gaming platforms. The aim was to place bombs in a top-down maze at strategic points to blast your opponents to bits, collecting power-ups as you went. It was frantic, it was fun and I spent many an hour with friends discovering its many nuances.
Now, Chinese developer MNGOVR have taken some of the essence from Hudson Soft’s classic and transposes it to virtual reality on the HTC Vive platform. Bomb U! places two players, you facing an AI or human controlled online adversary, atop your own destructible platforms suspended high above a lush, technicolor landscape.
The aim is simple, blast the floor from your opponent’s feet so that they fall to their demise. To do this, you’re supplied with spawning bombs which, using your SteamVR controllers you pick up and hurl in your opponent’s direction, they then have the opportunity to chuck it back at you before it explodes – and so on and so forth. From time to time, you’ll be treated to power ups, thus far restricted currently to a gun which you can aim either directly at your opponent or beneath their feet.
That game’s look and feel is infused with the kind of bright and positive Japanese-style visuals we haven’t seen an awful lot of in VR to this point and it makes a refreshing change from gritty, dark or neon futuristic surroundings. The animation too is spot on, with robotic avatars darting around their mini-arenas desperately lugging explosives in a bid for survival.
The title is simple and this is reflected appropriately in the publisher’s price as Bomb U! can be had for just £1.99 (around $2.50) on the Steam store and is available via Early Access right now. It’ll be interesting to see how the developer sees the game evolving towards an eventual final release, but we like what we’ve seen so far.
