SUPER BOMBERMAN COLLECTION

I went in expecting a routine nostalgia drop, and came out three hours later still doing one-more-round in the four-player battle arenas. The Super Bomberman Collection is exactly what it sounds like on the surface, but the execution lifts it above the average retro bundle in ways that are easy to miss if you skip the menus. The core of the package is five Super Famicom / SNES entries, from the original Super Bomberman (1993) through Super Bomberman 5 (1997). Numbers 4 and 5 had never been officially released outside Japan before this, so English-speaking players are getting a genuine first look at the series' late-SNES output. A pair of original Famicom Bomberman games round out the seven-title count, adding context for where the maze-and-bomb formula came from. Each entry builds on the last in small but meaningful ways: enemy AI gets trickier, power-up variety expands, and by the time you hit the later numbered entries you're juggling piercing bombs, boxing-glove kicks, and speed upgrades that change how the grid reads entirely. The single-player campaign in each game tasks you with clearing obstacle-packed mazes, finding the hidden portal, and surviving increasingly tricky boss encounters. Nothing here reinvents itself dramatically, but the loop stays clean throughout. For multiplayer, local split-screen supports up to four players in most titles and five in entries 3, 4, and 5. The battle arenas are where this collection genuinely shines. Remote Play Together is supported on PC, which extends the couch-party feel across the internet. The absence of a proper built-in online multiplayer mode is the one complaint worth voicing seriously. Reviewers and players have flagged it repeatedly, and they are right: bombing a friend via Remote Play is a workaround, not a solution. If your gaming circle is all in the same room, this barely matters. If you play mostly online, temper expectations. Red Art Games packed in a surprising amount of supplementary content. Boss Rush mode lets you chain together every boss from all seven games in a time-attack format, with Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty tiers tracking your completion time. The Bomb Radio jukebox covers the full series soundtrack and supports custom playlists. The gallery pulls over 200 pieces of original character art, development materials, and promotional illustrations, including original animation cels scanned for preservation. Unbox Mode renders the regional cartridge boxes and manuals as inspectable 3D models. None of this is padding: it is genuinely well-curated archival work. Quality-of-life additions include save states and a rewind function, which takes the edge off older difficulty spikes without gutting the challenge for players who want it straight. Screen filter options let you dial in your preferred CRT-or-clean visual preference. For solo players who grew up with a Super Nintendo, this is the most complete version of the Super Bomberman era available anywhere. For newcomers, the difficulty curve across seven games provides a decent on-ramp before the series' teeth show. The one sting lands if your friends are remote and you expected a full online suite. That missing feature costs real value for a subset of players, but it does not change how good the underlying games remain. Steam reviews sit at 88% positive, and on OpenCritic critics landed around 86 average with 93% recommending it, so reception lines up with what I experienced.

Alex · Scout Team

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