Review: BoomShine
Score:
75%
Trippy balls exploding, new age music, Ewan is in a 60's-inspired flash game... and he's hip to the groove liking it!...
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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It's a very small flash game, you have only one move you can make (and you are only allowed to make it once in each level), yet BoomShine is probably one of the most addictive S60 5th Edition touchscreen games I have come across.
Designed by Danny Miller, and officially ported to S60 by Jamie Fuller, the principle of Boomshine is simple. You need to explode as many of the coloured balls that are moving around the screen as possible. Each level has a target (e.g. 5/15 means you have to explode at least 5 balls from the 15 on screen) and when you achieve that, up to the next level you go, which has more balls, but a much higher target. All the way up to the final level requiring 55 explosions out of 60 balls.
And all this with the one move as I mentioned before. That move is 'tap once on the screen' to set off a small explosion that will blossom out from that point, hang around for a few seconds, and then retract. If during that time any of the balls that are moving around the screen enter the explosion field, they will also explode, with their own blossom effect... and so on and so on.
You can get some very pretty chain reactions if you can place (and time) your first and only explosion – and at later levels there's a certain amount of skill and prediction to make sure that the explosions crawl across the screen mopping up as many balls as possible. Add in the hauntingly new age music that plays in the background (which is nice... for the first hour or so, after that I muted the 5800) and you have a game that is over far too quickly, but thankfully has a bundle of replay value.
It's not perfect – the insistence that it is launched (and stays) in landscape mode while being played is annoying, as there is no reason from a gameplay viewpoint why it can't run in portrait as well. Also, the high score table is online only, I'd like to see a local one so I can challenge myself rather than every single person in the world who's got the maximum.
And yes, Flash does start to labour very slightly when the screen fills up with balls. A limitation of the runtime but it does lead to the occasional stutter on the screen.
Boomshine is definitely staying on my 5800. It fills the short moments in my life when I want something, and it looks a touch psychedelic as well. If it was coded up in the native C++ with a few more UI and game options then it would be a smash, but for now it's highly recommended, as long as you note the caveats above. To be honest I can easily live with them and I think you will too.
-- Ewan Spence, Sept 2009.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at