Boomeroad: Boomerang Road Craft Review

Boomeroad: Boomerang Road Craft is a game brought to you by flying debris and Bandai Namco. You play as an unnamed, unvoiced adventurer of unknown gender wearing a backpack, a lanyard, and strap-on heelies. We're given no other context for the main character, so I choose to believe that they're an UberEats driver who got the wrong address. You arrive in a pretty skybox filled with the Colosseum after it sneezed too hard, and your goal is to step on stone plates lined with blue or yellow LEDs, some of which have glowing inverted cones hanging above them (these are dubbed "monoliths", which presumably has something to do with the piece of modern art you face when you step on it.)

You begin with the uncanny power to double-jump, and then receive a boomerang (hence the name of the game). However, both parts of the name are deceiving. First, your boomerang is not an actual boomerang. It's more like a blunt tri-tip shuriken. Second, you don't craft roads. You generate glowing blue rails¹ whose path is controlled by a system that would be interesting and enjoyable if the game weren't so fucking short². As it is, I barely had the hang of it before I hit the ending.

You use your so-called boomerang to solve puzzles, which the developers have taken an interesting approach with, in that there aren't any. You're given a big floating course, with a handful of obstacle elements (switches to slam your blue rod into, small purple balls that fire lasers, concrete blocks with a red miasma around them, and fans on bricks), and off you go to find the monoliths and then leave the course. The monoliths aren't hard to find (what with the glowing cones above them), but the interesting thing is that there aren't any invisible walls, so you can very easily cheese the obstacles by hopping on a wall and tightrope-walking your way around the issues³.

After two(!!) levels, you reach a tower wherein you find a spot to put the boomerang you picked up 5 minutes beforehand. A door opens, revealing a white statue⁴, which then opens its eyes before the game cuts to credits. It's a bit of a squib, to be frank. We don't know who we are, why we're here, or why this chick is important. Some throwaway lines about "ancient relics" are added to the pre-awakening monologue, but nothing specific or useful. Apparently Indiana Jones imitators are not exempt from the gig economy.

It's a short game, too: it took me only 28 minutes to complete. There's a time attack mode that you unlock after story end, and this, paired with the secret-hunting element that is never actually mentioned in the game⁵ may get you more than an hour out of the game. The items you collect convey much of the story, but again, it's just hints. Oh, there's a statue of a man and a statue of a woman and a carving of a spaceship and an energy core that the menu says can power cryosleep. So what? I've got no context for any of this.

It's not a very well-made game, either. Every time a physics interaction started to occur it'd freeze for a few seconds⁶, and it craps itself on alt-tabbing or using the Steam overlay doodad.

I don't actually remember how I got this game. It was free, but I couldn't tell you where I heard about it from. It's not a terrible timewaster, but eventually you'll get bored and move on to greener pastures. Consider this a recommendation if you wish that Jet Set Radio took place in the world of Skyward Sword.