Introduction
When I first got interested in Panic Bomber, I was thinking, wrongly, that it was Neo Bomberman, the neogeo Bomberman Clone.
Story
In fact, it's more a tetris-like, or more precisely a Columns-like, where the point is to do bomberman head lines, making sure all heads on the line got the same color. Everybody knows the rest of the scenario.
Graphics
Graphics always reminds of the Bomberman game, with backgrounds of the well known characters, so that's really what you would expect from that kind of stuff.
Without no real effort on graphics quality, you're definitely stucked into that funny world, and the huge sprites that sometimes appear on screen on key moments breaks a bit with the routine of the game.
With Panic Bomber, don't expect complicated gameplay tricks or details, it's all about fun !
Gameplay
Each time you succeed in doing a line with the same heads, they're replaced by bombs on the bottom of the screen.
Sometimes a red bomb can get used to explode all of it.
Suddenly, the same kind of bomb appears in a random place of the screen, and destroys a bunch of stuff.
If at some point, just like most of the same kind of games, if the elements reach the top of the screen, and you can't do any more lines, it's the damn game over !
Solo mode is a bit repetitive, and the difficulty is getting higher and higher as the game goes through the different levels.
And again, just like in many of the other neo games of the same kind, the real fun comes out when you play the versus mode with a friend.
The fun is much, much bigger then.
Atmosphere
Music / Sounds
Music themes (the contrary would have been surprising) match the original bomberman ones, and various themes are just coming from some previous bomberman series from other platforms.
So if you just likes theses good old bomberman themes, then you will be pleased.
Replay Value
To conclude, if you're a huge bomberman fan, you will like that one for sure, and you will enjoy the idea of performing small bomberman heads alignments.
More objectively, i'm forced to admit that I spent good times with that bomberman game on the neo, and then again, I'm forced to admit it's not the best of its kind on the neogeo. It's just fun !
What else !
Conclusion
Panic Bomber is not rare at all, you can still find full kits sometimes in ebay, and you will even find many conversions properly done floating around, so if you're more into AES, and you have between 100 and 200 dollars to spend on it then you can give it a try.
