Grade: D
Puzzle game set to the sultry sounds of polka
Boomtown was made over three days at a Columbia Game Dev Jam 2020. That’s Columbia, the country, not the University. I’m impressed with the feat of making something playable in 3 days. It’s hard to grade a prototype like this on the same scale that I would a game that’s fully fleshed out.
In Boomtown, it’s a pretty short experience. The player is given a set of 5 walking bombs and 20 turn tokens. Each bomb leaves a trail of gunpowder behind as it walks, and you have one ignition to try and blow up as much of a town as you can. You can chain together multiple bombs by carefully setting the path of the walking bombs so that the trail of gunpowder overlaps. Unfortunately, it’s not a very satisfying explosion when the fireworks happen.
My biggest issue with the game, though, is the music. There’s some evil-sounding polka when the bomb’s characters are walking that just grates on my ears whenever it plays. I spent about 20 minutes monkeying around with this game before the evil polka broke my brain, and I put it down.
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