Back when I was a kid, one of the local pizza joints we visited at least once a week for their buffet was Pizza Inn.  Like many other pizza places, this one had a few arcade machines in the back.  You had your mainstays that were there pretty much forever, like Ms. Pac-Man, Spy Hunter, and Arkanoid.  But this restaurant also had a couple of machines in rotation that I had never seen in another arcade before, or only once or twice.  Some of these titles included stuff like Mr. Do!’s Castle and Bomb Jack.  Bomb Jack was made by what would become Tecmo and it starred a caped superhero character as he collected bombs in single screen areas while avoiding enemies.  Its appearance at Pizza Inn is what caused me to buy Mighty Bomb Jack when I got my NES.  The NES version added some side scrolling elements as well as obtuse hidden secrets that games back then tended to do.  There was a Bomb Jack 2 on European PCs, but it was just a reworked Thundercats game.  In Japan in the 90s there was a two player Bomb Jack arcade game called Bomb Jack Twin.  But aside from an appearance in the Arcade Archives collection, a Tecmo classic collection on the Xbox, and a secret outfit in a Tecmo Wii golf game, there hasn’t been much of Bomb Jack seen since.  But if you want to play an imitation of the game, now there’s Super Jagger Bomb, which plays so much like Bomb Jack, from the stage layouts to the backgrounds, that I’m surprised Tecmo hasn’t sued them!  It’s available on PlayStation consoles, Switch, and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

This review would be a lot easier if I could just say it plays like Bomb Jack, but since there probably isn’t a lot of people who have played that one, I’ll describe it here.  Your goal in each single screen is to collect all the bombs.  When you do, you’ll move to the next stage.  As a superhero, you can jump as high as you want and tap the button on the way down to glide, so you have a good amount of control over your character.  If you get hit by an enemy, you’ll lose a life and when all are lost it’s Game Over.  Two kinds of power ups will bounce around the screen periodically.  One just gives you points.  The other temporarily turns all enemies into coins you can collect for more points, and it’s handy when you need to clear the screen of baddies.

There is ONE improvement this game has over the original.  In Bomb Jack if you collect the bombs with lit fuses in succession, you could really increase your score exponentially.  But it was hard to tell which bombs had lit fuses.  In this game, before you start the level, they give you a preview path to take to collect the right bombs, and the lit bombs are much easier to see.

Unfortunately, everything else about the game is bad.  They use the exact same level layouts and backgrounds as the original game, except in lifeless 3-D.  One bad thing is that your character is taller than in the original game, so since the game uses the exact level layouts, they had to add a crouch move so you can fit in some of the spaces, which wasn’t a problem before.  But crouching is hard to pull off and bogs the game down here.  If you lose all your lives, you must start at the beginning, so I wish there was a stage select option, too.  Playing this game just makes me wish I was playing the original Bomb Jack instead, as this is just a cheap imitation.

Kid Factor:

Super Jagger Bomb is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Mild Fantasy Violence.  If you get hit by an enemy, you just fall to the ground while sad bleeps and bloops play.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.  Younger gamers may find it too difficult and/or repetitive, though.

Tags: Game Reviews