Polybomber is a game that attempts to capitalise on the 80s arcade shooters of yesteryear by keeping things geometric, minimalist, and somewhat skill-based. It has a small, incremental skill tree that will help you out over time, but the key thing with Polybomber is to time every shot. I only wish that player skill meant something more in the long-term gameplay loop.
Coming from the school of geometric shapes = retro graphics, Polybomber has you hovering as a ship at the top of the screen, dropping bombs on various shapes crossing the screen beneath you. They start off on the floor, but over time, they will come to have multiple lanes of shapes crossing from one side to the other, and if they reach it, they’ll damage your health. If the shape is blue, it can one-shot kill you, so you’ll prioritise those first, and ensure each bomb counts. That’s because it takes a couple of seconds for the bomb to reach the ground, and each bomb costs energy. Early in the game, you have to consider each shot, especially as some shapes move at different speeds, so you’ll be trying to take out multiple enemies in a single shot.
It starts off incredibly promising, and that only initially improves with the nifty extraction gameplay mechanic. At the end of each level, in order to win your points and take them to the upgrade screen, you’ll need to hover inside an extraction point for 10 seconds. Sometimes these points don’t line up nicely with environmental furniture that blocks your shots, so it’s a bit of a gamble. It’s even more of a gamble to choose not to extract, as your points roll over to the next level. The next level increases the speed, damage and spawn rate of enemies, but you’ll be stuck with the same equipment. Don’t roll the dice of luck too often, as it’ll bite you. When you die, all your points are lost.
Polybomber starts out strong but quickly derails with multiple bugs and balancing issues. As you upgrade your weapons, you’ll upgrade your energy replenishment and the number of bombs, lasers, black holes, or general clustering of attacks. What starts out as a game of timing and skill turns into mindless button-mashing slop, and it does it quite subtly at first. By around level 30, I was button-mashing and caring much less about finesse because I didn’t need to any more. I was overpowered. If you don’t have the timing skills, by replaying earlier levels and spending your points, you can upgrade yourself out of a skills gap, too. The longer you play, the more unbalanced Polybomber becomes, and it becomes a bit of a slog.
Part of the issue, I’m guessing, is that despite all my general stances (including a “don’t send me Gen-AI work” disclaimer), this game has code and assets produced using generative AI. It shows. UI glitch in and out. Sometimes the upgrade menu doesn’t display properly, and it always takes a while to load. The five power-ups you unlock sometimes do not trigger. It’s a glitchy mess that not even a card-based roguelike mode can save. I don’t know what was manually built, and what was generatively created, but the game creaks in specific technical places, so I can probably guess…
I do not support gen-AI. I will not view gen-AI works favourably. I’d rather have taken an uneven game with personality, charm, and a few rough edges than a sterile, bland, and rickety game. Please don’t send me gen-AI games. I will actively ignore them. I could feel something was off about Polybomber and then found the AI declaration on the Steam page. I just thought it was misguided and poorly optimised. Now I know it was vibed that way. Despite all this, Polybomber commits the biggest sin of all. It is dull and uninspired. There are seeds of a fun and enjoyable game here, but they are bogged down by poor level design, rudimentary enemies and an upgrade system that robs you of player agency. A shame.
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