If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of Super Bomberman, it’s time to crawl out, set a bomb next to your rock, and watch it explode! The Bomberman series are classic maze-based action games from Hudson Soft, a now-defunct software firm eventually purchased by publishing giant Konami. The series has been around since the early 80s first on Japanese computers and later on the NES before moving to SNES and modern consoles. With all the collections coming out these days, it’s no surprise that Konami and developer Red Art Games finally made it to Bomberman with the Super Bomberman Collection and you’re definitely going to want to check it out!
By far the most popular versions of Bomberman are Saturn Bomberman and the SNES Bomberman games. While the insanely fun Saturn Bomberman is not included on this collection, all of the original NES and SNES versions of the game are along with a few other wonderful additions that make this a uniquely appealing collection! The focus of this collection is definitely the SNES games. There are five of them, though only two were previously released in North America and Super Bomberman 3, 4, and 5 were previously untranslated officially. In addition to the SNES games, there’s a bonus section to the collection that contains the NES version of Bomberman 1 and 2 as well as a jukebox of Bomberman music and an art gallery, but let’s focus on the SNES games for now.
Super Bomberman is probably the game that most players are familiar with and it’s arguably the best game in the entire series. Each game on the Super Bomberman Collection features visuals of the cart and box as well as a breakdown of the items available and what they do and a full scan of the manual. The first game came with a 4 player multitap on the SNES but fortunately, Switch players can do this wirelessly with no problem. The entire series follows a standard formula with options of Normal Game and Battle game available. If you’re playing two players, both can play either mode, but with 3-4 players, you are relegated to Battle Game only. Normal mode is a series of stages where you have to blow up destructible walls with bombs and kill all the enemies in each stage. Enemies sometimes just walk into you and later on have a variety of attacks.
At the end of each set of levels is a boss which you will have to defeat. Each boss has a special attack and requires a bit more skill to defeat than normal enemies. Surviving boss attacks can be challenging because the bosses are often large or extremely fast and if you haven’t powered up enough, you’re likely to be in trouble quickly. Beating a boss lets you proceed to the next area of the game where you’ll face new environmental challenges, different art styles, and different enemies. It’s a fairly straightforward design that’s extremely well implemented. The real thing you’ll have to pay attention to however is bombing.
Your bomb blasts can kill you as well because…well…they’re bombs. As you blow up walls, various powerups are revealed that can increase the number of bombs you carry, the range of your explosions, roller skates to speed up, and various powers including the ability to kick or throw bombs. Powerups are the key to success in Super Bomberman as they will enable you to attack from range, move out of the way of enemy attacks, and even throw bombs out of the way if you make a mistake or the enemy drops them. An unpowered Bomberman is quickly a dead Bomberman, so make sure that even after you’ve wiped out all the enemies in a given stage, you still need to blow up as many walls as possible in order to find any hidden powerups inside. Just make sure you keep one eye on the timer because if you run out of time, you’re dead.
Each Super Bomberman game changes up the recipe. Some are only a bit different and some are radically different. Super Bomberman 2 is harder with a huge number of new powerups including the bomb passer and block passer, which allow you to walk through bombs and blocks. Maintaining these will make the game much easier and allow you to sneak attack enemies by walking through blocks that they can’t or trapping them between bombs then walking away. The new super bomb that blows through blocks is also incredibly powerful as it shoots blasts directly through blocks to the limit of your explosive range. When combined with the block passer and the maximum range powerup, you can basically wipe out anything on the stage without even being nearby.
Super Bomberman 3 goes back to the original design of the first game with the return of co-op and might be the most interesting. This is the first game in the SNES series that introduces the kangaroo sidekick named Louie as well. Instead of a powerup, an egg will sometimes drop from enemies or bricks. Walking over the egg spawns a kangaroo that you hop onto as a mount, allowing you to move faster, kick bombs, or even jump over walls depending on which color Louie you get. You can also take a hit, losing Louie in the process, but having a mount is a bit of insurance against sudden death, even if the pixels of Louie sometimes block your view of the bombs you’ve dropped. All the new powerups are here as well, making for a much more frantic game where you really need to pay attention with the combination of Louie and powerups. On top of that, there are mine carts, creative level designs in the later game, and massive bosses that round out an amazing experience.
The fourth game in the Super Bomberman Collection, Super Bomberman 4, has a new layout. Instead of moving from area to area, you’ve been sucked into a black hole and you time travel to a different era for each world. There is a series of robot bosses that are reminiscent of Mega Man as well, though you don’t gain their powers and you’ll have to fight both the robot and a larger boss in each stage. There are some nifty new level designs that make Super Bomberman 4 particularly fun in single player including various types of cover, bounce pads, and even enemy spawning towers. Super Bomberman 4 isn’t quite as fun as 3 and the bosses are particularly hard as well, making this a neat but somewhat frustrating entry into the series.
The final main game, Super Bomberman 5, has by far the most stages of any Bomberman, but the layout is frustrating and somewhat opaque unless you look up what to do. Most of the stages are fairly simplistic and you can end up repeating the same stages easily with the weird level layout and multiple warp points. While it’s neat to let you go to a huge number of levels, the game ends up somewhat tedious after a while and after the experiences of Super Bomberman 3 and 4, this feels like the weakest entry in the series.
In addition to the Normal Game, each Super Bomberman has a Battle Game as well where you can play up to 4 players simultaneously in a free-for all battle. You can play solo with up to three bot players as well, or mix and match between settings. There are a number of different stages with different environmental effects, and you can choose which stage to play in and how many rounds to play. This is where the real fun comes in because local co-op in Bomberman is an absolute blast (no pun intended). From Super Bomberman 3 on, you can play up to 5 players simultaneously, leading to countless couch arguments over the years. The appeal of Battle Game in Super Bomberman is hard to overstate and even new players quickly get the hang of play and are throwing barbs and elbows as they play. It’s just good, clean fun that doesn’t take too long and we don’t have much of that in gaming anymore.
If five full games with independent unique multiplayer modes and hundreds of levels wasn’t enough for you, don’t worry. Super Bomberman Collection still has more! There’s a bonus section of the main menu that has two additional bonus games, the first and second Bomberman games for NES. Unfortunately, they’re more historical relics than fun games, especially with the high quality of the SNES Bomberman games. It’s neat to see the original early versions of the game but it became so much more later on that they’re a rough go at best. Bomberman is particularly painful with repetitive chiptunes, levels which are not particularly creative, and rough graphics, even for 8 bit gaming. Bomberman 2 improves somewhat and is certainly more playable, but again is nothing special. Also included in the Bonus menu are a jukebox where you can play music from all the games if that’s your thing and a huge art gallery with original and concept art from throughout the series.
A collection wouldn’t be a collection these days without some additional functionality either and the Super Bomberman Collection has enough to suit all but the pickiest players. The biggest and most important modernization is a rewind button, sparing you the grinding replays that we all had to suffer through in the 90s. Just a tap of rewind here and there makes a tortuously precise game into a casual and fun romp unless you’re a glutton for punishment. There’s also a save anywhere function built into the collection which provides 3 save slots for every single game, finally recognizing the fact that not all of us can leave the system on all night or have the time to finish a game like Bomberman in a single sitting.
The controls are entirely mappable now too, making it easy to adjust the gameplay to your preferred buttons, a nice change from the 16 bit era’s sometimes nonsensical configurations. There are several visual frames available too, though nothing particularly exciting even if the Bomberman art is good. You can also adjust the visual settings to hid the default button prompts, shrink or expand the screen to different aspect ratios (we mostly played in 4:3) and even turn on CRT mode to soften the visuals and make them look more vintage. While other collections definitely have more fancy extras, especially for visual resolution options, everything here is smartly designed, easy to use, and looks great. There’s plenty for almost every type of player here and the Super Bomberman Collection is perhaps the most approachable release in the Bomberman series to date as a result.
Normally we’d cover the sound and video but all of the games in the Super Bomberman Collection are unchanged from their original releases and have been expertly updated into HD. Classic Bomberman music is still awesome for the most part and there are a few excellent earworms but honestly, the fun factor is so high that even if the music was terrible, it would still be great. Super Bomberman Collection is a great party game with a bunch of awesome single player modes and a few great extras and it’s honestly one of the best collections we’ve played in a while. At only $20 it’s an absolute must-buy and if you like having fun and blowing stuff up, this is a no-brainer of a purchase for any gamer!
This review is based on a digital copy of Super Bomberman Collection provided from the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55” Sony 1080p TV. Super Bomberman Collection is also available on PS5, Switch, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.