While Super Bomberman R 2 is an excellent game, it lacks the charm of older titles in the series, and as a longtime fan of the franchise, it left me feeling cold.
Singleplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
Super Bomberman R 2 is a very nice-looking game with a cheerful art style and surprisingly good voice acting; the character models look fantastic, and the 2D artwork is vibrant and memorable.
Unfortunately, all these things increase development costs, and as a result, Super Bomberman R 2 is fatally overpriced at $49.99, all but assuring the multiplayer community will fail to gain significant traction to ensure long-term development and that Konami will be forced into considering relaunching it as a free-2-play title, in effort to recoup development costs.
This is especially troubling considering its predecessor, Super Bomberman R, was forced to relaunch as a free-2-play (Super Bomberman R Online), only to shutter in late 2022 without offering players refunds or allowing them to carry over said purchases to Super Bomberman R 2.
Any indication that history is repeating itself will undoubtedly discourage players who paid full price for the Super Bomberman R 2, likely dooming the entire Super Bomberman R series and possibly resulting in the entire Bomberman franchise entering a lengthy hiatus, lest the continued lacklustre releases devalue the Bomberman IP entirely.
Super Bomberman R 2’s single-player game is incredibly well made, fairly content-heavy, and offers some enjoyable cutscenes. Unfortunately, it has one major issue: It is very boring, and players are forced to blow up the same blocks repeatedly while facing incredibly easy-to-defeat enemies to collect the hundreds of Ellons needed to explore each world fully.
While I like the concept of earning XP, levelling up and unlocking new abilities with each milestone, it is a needless complication to the established Super Bomberman formula, and the fact that said progress is reset with each world adds insult to injury.
While some players will enjoy Super Bomberman R 2’s single-player mode, few would want to replay it. Frankly, I wish Konami offered Super Bomberman R 2 at $24.99 or less to bolster the online community instead of investing in a single-player campaign unlikely to entertain any but the most diehard fans of Super Bomberman Lore.
While much of the single-player mode is dull, the secret puzzles scattered through the various worlds are challenging and incredibly well-made. Without question, I would have preferred a wide selection of such puzzles, with an easily-to-navigate menu and the option to replay them, rather than the tedious and repetitive exploration mode that is the mainstay of Super Bomberman R 2’s single-player offering.
Super Bomberman R 2 introduced a new castle mode, which sets two teams of players against one another in this objective-based mode, with defenders utilising fixed defences and walls to slow down the attackers. In contrast, attackers try to secure the chests being defended by the defending team.
If the attacking team fails to capture all chests before the timer runs out, the defending team wins, and of course, the reverse is true, with the defenders losing if they fail to stop the attackers or run out the clock.
This mode also makes an appearance in the single-player campaign, and being able to customise your base defences is a nice touch; however, the actual gameplay of castle mode is incredibly basic, and often, the best way to win as a defender is spam bombs near the castle gate, keeping the enemy team from being able to claim their prize.
While this strategy is not foolproof, and good attacking players will overcome it, for most encounters, placing a few defences and spamming bombs is more than enough to see off any threat to even the most poorly defended “castle”.
Super Bomberman R 2’s robust multiplayer support is impressive and ultimately frustrating, with players being unable to choose which mode they wish to play due to certain modes and maps being only made available at certain times of day.
Recently, I hopped on to Super Bomberman R 2, hoping to play my favourite mode (the 64-player battle royale), only to see that I could only play the standard mode 1 vs 1 at that time.
While I like the standard mode, I wanted to play the 64-player mode, and being told what mode I have to play feels awful, considering that Super Bomberman R 2 is not a free 2-play title. People are paying almost $50 for this experience.
Fortunately for those with friends & family who play Super Bomberman R 2, custom matches are possible both online and locally, ensuring that traditional Bomberman modes can be enjoyed at any time, in perhaps the best way to enjoy them, with those you care about.
On that note, Super Bomberman R 2 does not allow people to form parties, meaning players cannot play online ranked matches with friends.
Undoubtedly, this was done to mitigate the possibility of match-fixing and rank farming; however, the question remains, is there anyone who cares enough about their rank in Super Bomberman R 2 to go through to the effort of match-fixing? I doubt it.
Super Bomberman R 2 has a massive amount of cosmetics and a fully functional cash shop, which seems to indicate that there are plans already in place to transition to a free-2-play business model sometime in future.
However, for right now, the only way to acquire store currency is by playing the game; how long will that remain the case, and if Konami has already seen the writing on the wall and made plans to reduce the currently generous rate at which premium currency earned from simply playing the game is yet unknown.
SUPER BOMBERMAN R 2 is a action video game developed and published by Konami, it was released on 13 September 2023 and retails for $49.99+.
SUPER BOMBERMAN R 2 is available on the following platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
While we do not know how many people play Super Bomberman R 2 on console, the PC community is tiny, having peaked at just 220 players at launch and struggling to reach a double-digit concurrent user count for much of the day.
That being said, matchmaking is very fast due to the size of the crossplay community, the strength of its Japanese fanbase, and perhaps most importantly, for all regions, but especially those outside of Japan, the presence of bots/CPU players.
On average Super Bomberman R 2 takes between 6 and 50 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
Super Bomberman R 2 supports:
SUPER BOMBERMAN R 2 offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
SUPER BOMBERMAN R 2 is rated PEGI 7+ and contains:
Super Bomberman R 2 is a nice-looking game, a content-heavy game that plays well and is respectful of the franchise; however, after playing for a few hours and seeing essentially all there is to see, I cannot recommend Super Bomberman R 2 at full price, and honestly would have paid more than $20 it, if I had not been given a free copy for review purposes.
