Confession time, PCGN! I have a bit of a thing for Bombshell. No, not the main character, though her redesign to total badass from bad punk definitely helped, but the game itself. Every trailer we see has been dangerously on the shoddy side of pre-release materials, but I’m still interested in picking it up. Perhaps it’s just a desperate need for an action game with a woman in the main role that’s actually on PC. Maybe the Diablo-with-guns concept is something I’m so weak to that all the dodgy animation in the world doesn’t put me off. But there’s definitely something.
It’s certainly bloodycool. Aliens, guns, robot arms, explosives sending the latter into the former with destructive force – I can get behind all that. Shelly Harrison herself is someone I definitely want to play as and her character so far has seemed just on the right side of generic all-american hero-with-a-dark-past to be interesting, if not especially unique.
But damn, the actual in-game stuff leaves me worried. The stop-start nature in this one doesn’t gel with what the game is trying to be about – shooting a whole bunch of things – and weapons don’t have a big enough impact. Shelly looks like someone that shoots RPGs out of her shoulders, not peppers machine gun bullets into unreactive enemies. I like the scale on the boss, being so big that Shelly takes up almost nothing of the screen in comparison, but it’s not being exploited to its fullest.
But still, still I want to play it. Out of hope that they nail the aesthetic elements by release, or that 3D Realms have picked their footage poorly, more than anything else. That’s still supposed to be this year, though what state 3D Realms and Interceptor are in post-lawsuit is still to be revealed.