Boomtown Bowling

Sometimes people need to destroy something in order to feel better about their lives, although that something is usually a small object of no real consequence. On the other hand, you can only imagine what life would be like if humans had the power to destroy entire buildings with ease. Thankfully, we have video games to take care of that urge whenever we want.

Boomtown Bowling is an arcade game in which your only purpose is to destroy as much as possible and cause the maximum amount of havoc. In essence, you control a bowling ball that has the ability to move really fast and be indestructible. Thus, the goal is to knock down houses, office buildings and trees with as much force as possible.

The game was designed for a jam, which means that it’s about as simple as it can be in regards to the gameplay mechanics. Even so, the ball has a couple of special abilities you can make use of, such as the fact that you can explode after the Rampage bar is full. Not only that, but you can also jump and sprint in the desired direction in order to gain the required momentum.

As mentioned before, the Rampage bar fills whenever you manage to destroy a building or anything else, so it shouldn’t be very difficult to get it full. On the other hand, the ball moves rather quickly until you pick up a bit of momentum, which means that much of your time is spent trying to pick up speed. Speaking of which, you only have one minute at your disposal, and there are no other game modes.

As for the graphics, the game uses Unreal Engine 4 in order to render the environments and the ball itself, so it certainly looks decent, even if there are no textures, just empty polygons. However, there is a pretty potent and convincing physics engine, which is great in a game that encourages destruction. Granted, it could use more work when it comes to the ball movement mechanics.

In the end, Boomtown Bowling is not a brilliant game, but it can come in handy when you feel like destroying something and you do not want to damage anything in the process. Thus, you can release stress levels and have some fun at the same time.