Umihara Kawase Bazooka! is such a weird title to wrap my head around. It’s nothing like what I expected. Not from the screenshots, the series in general, or the gameplay on the whole. This is a very niche title that I’m hard-pressed to figure out who it was intended for. Fans of the series are going to see this as a radical departure from what makes the series a classic, while new players thinking it looks like Smash Bros. featuring tons of characters will be let down that it’s nothing more than a out-of-date, single-screen arcade game. Heck, it’s not even a bad game, just one that feels out of place in this universe.
On the whole, Umihara Kawase Bazooka! is a game that brings nothing new to the table and feels very much like an inoffensive arcade game that you might see crammed into the corner of a colorful ’90s arcade joint. You pop in a couple of tokens and have yourself a good time but that fun quickly burns out and you move onto something a little more meaty. This burnout is even quicker when you realize there isn’t much of a single-player element to keep you going at home, a problem old-school arcade titles had when they made the transition home back in the day.
Umihara Kawase itself is probably a series you aren’t aware of. While the series was big in Japan, it never made much of a splash in the West. It’s been around since 1994 when it release on the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in the West) and went on to have a number of games on numerous platforms all the way to 2019 with Umihara Kawase Fresh! All of these titles kept the core platforming gameplay that saw you traverse a number of interconnected stages, each connected by a door. Stages are essentially closed off worlds with a number of platforms. You can think of it as traversing to an exit door inside a large box with enemies and all sorts of moving platforms. It doesn’t sound like much but it did come with a hook; A literal hook.
You plan a route to the exist and use your throwable hook to reach platforms and take out enemies. It was a slower sort of platformer, almost a puzzle-platformer, that required you to think and allowed for lots of replayability thanks to each stage having multiple ways and paths to complete. The fun was exploring and experimenting with the stages you got dropped into. You can run, jump, hook, and pull yourself up ledges on your way to the exit. It was good clean fun that still holds up well today. I mention this because Umihara Kawase Bazooka! is nothing like that while still using the core gameplay elements of the series in a different genre making it all the more weird.
Umihara Kawase Bazooka! is no longer that well-paced adventure that asks you to think, but is now a single-screen action game that is more fast-paced along the lines of something like Bubble Bobble, another classic series that got a new title recently. On the surface the gameplay works but it isn’t ideal for what the game wants to do. Taking a slower game and trying to force it into a multiplayer fast action title means it turns out a bit clunky and awkward. The point of the game is to kill wave after wave of enemies until you collect the stages required coin limit that allows you to move onto the next stage.
You can hook enemies and turn them into projectiles that can be shot and bounced across the playfiled to rack up combos. You can chain kills together in this manner which is neat if out of place. Umihara Kawase Bazooka! features these weird stretches of fast-paced kills in-between slow sections of waiting and platforming to reach an ideal area to engage enemies. This causes some real pacing issues within stages as you spend quite a bit of time just waiting on enemies to spawn or in trying to slowly work your way across a stage to where a single enemy is just pacing around. The style of game simply doesn’t fit well in the Umihara Kawase universe, at least not in terms of gameplay.
The idea is solid but held back by sticking to the Umihara Kawase formula. The gameplay from that series isn’t ideal for the type of quick arcade game that Bazooka is trying for. The coin system instead of the door system also hurts the pacing as it would have worked much better to design fun stages that require you to clear the enemies from the screen to open the exit door. You’d get the satisfaction of winning with that little endorphin rush for good play instead of just waiting on a few floating coins to drop from a random enemy. Winning a stage with enemies left on the playfield just feels like a hollow victory for something trying to be a skill-based arcade game. And because this is an arcade game this gameplay never changes.
Stages never get as intricate or challenging as they do in Umihara Kawase with only the enemies changing. They get tougher to be sure, but you’ll quickly figure out their patterns. What stinks is that in single-player stages always amount to you finding a safe position and then spamming your characters special projectile attack to clear enemies. It becomes boring, something made more so as the characters you can select from are wickedly unbalanced. Each has their own special secondary attack and a special meter move that beefs it up even more. This is a great idea and helps player find someone they enjoy playing as, but some kill the game outright.
You’ll just end up playing someone with a large projectile that can traverse an entire stage. I picked Queen because she looked cute and never looked back thanks to her pig attack. You see, Queen can throw a large black pig as her secondary attack and this pig will kill any enemy it comes into contact with. Not only that, but the pig will run forward until it hits something. It’ll fall down to lower levels and keep running; It’ll hit a wall and bounce back and keep going; It can be thrown up to higher platforms; It can used used without restriction with Queen’s special throwing out three pigs at once. This means you simply park at the upper corner of a map and just tap a single button to win considering the coins will float towards you.
The only time I had to move from my death perch was when unkillable enemies popped up. These would, in theory, be a good way to keep you from doing what I was doing but instead kill the experience. Most of these enemies simply need a certain type of attack to kill, something negated as Queen can hook her own pigs and turn them into easy projectiles, with one requiring you to jump to destroy. It’s that last one that drove me insane as the instructions say to double-jump to kill it which isn’t entirely the case. What it means is that you need to get really close and double jump over it to blow it up. The issue is this only seems to work whenever it feels like and when it doesn’t you simply take damage. And when you do get hit you get locked into a bounce that lasts far too long and can lock you into a death loop is you bounce into another enemy.
I’ll call back to a few paragraphs ago and note that this game feels like an arcade game that’s fun for a few rounds and burns out fast. It’s the game you play while waiting for you turn on the Street Fighter II machine to open up. And in terms of longevity it doesn’t offer much as there are only four world ten stages each. This means you get 40 stages with four boss battles which isn’t nearly enough for a game like this. The new Bubble Bobble has over 100 and even the one from the ’80s had at least 100 to keep you working. And while there is online and co-op multiplayer, adding more players makes things messy as you can hurt each other meaning everyone will be bouncing around without any control.
Umihara Kawase Bazooka! with 40 stages means you can easily burn through it in a single sitting without a great deal of trouble. Maybe the developers knew they didn’t have something too deep and just kept it short, which is a real shame as there is something to this idea. I think of something like Wrecking Crew for the NES. That isn’t a great game and has a single gimmick to work with but at least it gives you 100 stages you can play at any time right off the bat. Look, I’m okay with a great game being short, but if you give me something really basic and simple at least give me a lot of it to keep me coming back every now and then, something I get from a game like Bubble Bobble. Everything about the production here just feels like a cheap afterthought, almost as if they had these assets from Umihara Kawase Fresh! and wanted to toss out something quick in times for the holiday season.
What really sucks is that Umihara Kawase Bazooka! isn’t a bad idea. Other games show that this sort of arcade experience can still work in the modern age, Bubble Bobble 4 is the perfect example. The problem is that that title suck to what worked and expanded on it. Umihara Kawase Bazooka! takes the solid gameplay of Umihara Kawase and sticks into into a genre where it doesn’t quite work. Umihara Kawase Bazooka! is fine but will leave fans of the series wanting to go back to older games and leave new fans wondering what all the fuss is with the series.
Pros:
+ Large Cast
+ Online & Co-op Multiplayer
Cons:
– Gameplay Issues
– Pacing Problems
– Kinda Boring
Final Score
*Review code provided by publisher*
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