I love me some Bomberman, but this game on PC Engine is only a slightly bit better than the original NES release.

It follows classic rules: mazes with enemies, one power-up per maze, and when you kill everyone you can exit. The formula still works, but for whatever reason Turbografx version is very insistent on giving you rarer power-ups in higher quantities. Now, this wouldn't be an issue: walking through bombs and walls feels good. However, if you already have those power-ups, collecting them does virtually nothing. Unlike other Bomberman games that first beef your fire and bombs up, here I managed to reach max fire range only after completing more than HALF the game!

I think powering up your bombs is the most enjoyable aspect of those games, and this Bomberman bungles it up by constantly offering you stuff that you already have. Future games would also offer you choices between various power-ups, but this game only has remote control, as well as walking through bombs and walls.

There is a slight quality of life upgrade from the original Bomberman in that after beating all the enemies the power-up block lights up, but I do wish the door would light up too, since maybe a fourth of my playtime with this game consisted of bombing walls in an empty maze just trying to find the exit.

I also feel like this is one of the easier Bomberman titles. You're pretty slow, but so are most of the enemies, and the only touble comes from being spawned with one of those Bear Heads immediately having access to you, since it's one of the few enemies that feels like it has some sort of AI.

If your only choice is NES original or this game, I'd say play this one, but in today's world there's really no reason to go back to earlier games since each platform has approximately 800 Bomberman titles.

Well-balanced but somewhat monotonous arcade-style game. Compared to Super Bomberman 1, it has fewer and weaker powerups and is slower to give them to you (no kick!), doesn't stuff the back half full of enemies who take multiple hits to kill, doesn't give you so much start-of-level mercy invincibility you can clear out the entire level before you become vulnerable, and has sensible bosses who obey the rules of the game. On the other hand, it's 64 levels long and most of them are double- or triple-width. The exit, which is buried under a random destroyable tile, can take upward of a minute to find. Enemy variety is a bit lacking.

The final boss is total garbage.

Now, this is what I call a Bomberman game, this is where the franchise truly began.

First of all, I'd like to give a bit of appreciation to the PC Engine for having all of these obscure games and being pretty much the best console of the fourth generation. This console is overlooked by many due to not having the most famous franchise on there but sometimes big names don't equal good games, and even still, this is the console with Castlevania Rondo of Blood being the best Castlevania game ever made and can't compare to the quality to any of the Castlevania games on the Sega Genesis or the Super Nintendo, but I'm getting out of track here, all I'm saying is that people are missing out.

Bomberman 90' is pretty much a reimagined version of the NES Bomberman game with identical gameplay and pretty much all of its features improved to perfection. This is the first Bomberman featuring a local multiplayer option with the ability to play with up to 5 people which seems like one hell of a fun mayhem, unfortunately, I don't have anyone to play with and I do not really know how to set up a netplay for PC Engine games or if it even exists in the first place.

The singleplayer part of the game was entirely revamped to have a very simple story about how black Bomberman stole a girl who might be white Bomberman's girlfriend or something, and the game is separated into 8 worlds with 8 stages each featuring one boss on the eighth stage of each world.
This was a very welcomed addition but unfortunately, like the original game this one also has a total of 50 stages which do get a bit boring and tedious to get through, it's not necessarily hard, especially with the great number of power-ups you find along the way making you somewhat OP if you combine them all together. You have the usual power-ups for the explosion radius and the number of bombs you can use at the same times but we also have some power-ups which I have no idea if they were in the original or not. There's the powerup that lets you walk through breakable walls and it's a pretty damn overpowered one, the other overpowered one is the remote control bomb which lets you explode a bomb on command so when mixed with the previous powerup it does make the early game a breeze if you pay attention.

As I've previously said, the game does tend to be quite lengthy with a total of 50 stages. This game like the original has a password option and thankfully they are cut in half unlike the original which is probably like 20 characters long. But who cares about passwords it's 1990 we can save our progress! Saving progress is only available once you lose all of your life and honestly, all you lose for saving and reloading a file is losing your current score but who cares about the score on a home console game with no online leaderboard.

Overall, this game is pretty much the base of what we would see coming out of the Bomberman franchise for the coming decade, and for its first big debut in 1990 this is a pretty stellar Bomberman game, but in the end, it's still a Bomberman game so it's nothing all to impressive compared to other video games.