Dud: 10 Minutes Of 3D Realms' Bombshell

Given that Bombshell [official site] seemingly began life as a Duke Nukem game, before legal battling saw the aging blonde bimbo replaced with a bodacious babe, I'd expected it would be more bombastic. Explosions! Quips! Explosions! Flushable toilets! Explosions! A sense of humour. A bit of a bad attitude. Something. Anything. Instead, its twin-stick shooting looks kinda fun but the wrapping is so dull.

We've got our first proper look at the game in a new gameplay trailer coming out of QuakeCon, which shows ten minutes of hot fetch quest action (find a key for a supply crate!) with dull dialogue and no flushable toilets.

The shooting looks fun enough, though a little flat, and I dig playing with skill trees and upgrades to make the murderer of my dreams. But gosh, what is the game and plot wrapped around it? Playing as a superhuman supersoldier with a cyberarm should lead to wacky supermurder antics. Instead, here's a chunk of dialogue from a soldier chap (voiced by one of the devs as a placeholder, I hope) giving Bombshell her orders:

"We need your help. My squad and I were on course to deliver supplies to a small GDF outpost when we got jumped by some of the locals. We dealt with them, but one of my lieutenants was forced to retreat, taking the key to this crate here with him. Without it, there's no supplies and no delivery. We can't leave without it."

Riveting stuff. Who cares! She appears to be on an alien world, blasting away fleshbeasts, and yet for some reason it has a garbage story to drive the action. The action could drive the action: you're a supersoldier with a cyberarm, of course you've come to murder everything. The level art style looks boring for a hellworld too.

If Bombshell is what happened to Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction, which it certainly seems to be given how Dukey a few characters look, it seems utterly lost without Duke Nukem. He may have bad personality, but at least he has some - what's on show here has little.

Interceptor Entertainment, them lot behind the recent Rise of the Triad revival, are making Bombshell. It'll have the name of former Duke overlords 3D Realms on the box too, but the new 3D Realms are owned by Interceptor and mostly a name with a lot of nostalgia attached to it.

Bombshell is due this autumn.