Super Jagger Bomb 2: Go East is an arcade-style action platformer from uninspiringly-named Spanish soloist studio CheapeeSoft Games and has been published by eastasiasoft. A sequel to the 2022 original this game very much continues in the same vein as the previous title.
As we said in our original Super Jagger Bomb review, that game was an attempt to take the 1984 arcade classic Bomb Jack and give it a bit of a 2.5D update.
And it managed to get in the ballpark at least. Some of the elements were there. The basic jumping, enemy-avoiding movement combined with patterns of bombs that you were encouraged to collect in the correct order. It really borrowed heavily from the original, which is something that we’d have encouraged if the game had pulled it off.
Indeed, this sequel continues in that vein entirely. Bomb Jack was always pretty much Pac-Man with gravity essentially. You jumped around the screen collecting bombs and avoiding nasties. And if you picked up bombs in the correct order (i.e; looked for the ones that sparked), you’d get more points. This game does the same thing and so did the original Super Jagger Bomb.
Unfortunately, Super Jagger Bomb had several issues. The heavy inertia on the main character, the slightly-confusing perspective, the bland locations, the low-poly visuals and a non-existent difficulty curve that allowed us to complete all 100 levels easily in our first attempt. It all conspired to make the game pretty uninspiring, making it all fall very flat.
But it wasn’t a complete write off, mainly because there was a little bit of that Bomb Jack magic sprinkled in there. Sure, it struggled to shine through but there was a little bit there. Just enough to give an ardent fan of Taito’s classic a little nostalgia, albeit in a very rough around the edges kind of way.
So, does Super Jagger Bomb 2 fix any of that? Well, the key things definitely aren’t fixed. That is to say that the inertia still makes the action feel clumsy and imprecise, which was always the biggest issue and that’s compounded with the visuals which, while slightly more pretty, do present some issues with clarity, especially the way that enemies just fade into existence. In Bomb Jack, all enemies started as little guys who fell, Lemmings-style, to the ground and then transformed into one of several types of main enemy. So, you could always kind of track what they were up to.
But here they just fade in, a process only marked with a faint glow, and then they’re there, fully formed and taking one of your lives. It’s the main way we lose lives in this sequel. The equivalent of hitting an outlane in Pinball FX.
One of the original game’s flaws was how easy it was and that, at least, has changed here. Indeed, this sequel is a fair bit harder, arguably too hard now. The only change really seems to be that they no longer throw lots of extra lives at you but it’s very apparent how much of a tougher game this is. You can only continue if you reach level 31 and, later, 61, and getting there just seems a lot harder. The thing is, it’s never because of the level layouts or the number of enemies (which is far less than you’d get on Bomb Jack) but really just down to movement, visuals and the fact that everything seems cramped on the screen now.
One thing the game has added is the ability to break certain platforms. This involves crouching or double-tapping and is quite unintuitive. There’s a ‘Flight License’ mode that takes you through all of this though. If anything it proves how awkward the game can be, but you do have to give credit to the devs for trying to add something extra to this sequel. They also throw in the occasional bonus level but these, again, just highlight how fussy the controls are.
Overall though, Super Jagger Bomb 2 does feel like an attempt to do a little bit more than they did in the original game and while the additional difficulty does probably make the game more engaging, it’s not pitched quite right and at no point did the game really feel like it was any fun to play. But, it’s not absolutely awful either and it feels like they’re getting a bit closer to making something good. They just need better play testers maybe.
Summary
eastasiasoft’s Bomb Jack clone gets a sequel which doesn’t really improve anything but does take the previously trivial difficulty level a little too far in the opposite direction. We’re not really sure who this one is for because it certainly doesn’t land for the Bomb Jack obsessives here.
