Playing indie games one of the best methods to understand and gain knowledge of the endless creativity that oozes out of game developers. If you can’t invest months into these gems, playing a few hours of Boomerang X could be enough to give you a valuable insight.
Being creative with games can is the best solution for studios that cant obtain a huge budget. Most of the time, with these indie titles, the results really pay off. When it comes to developing indie games, using your imagination can open many doors.
The more you show originality when creating the finer details, the more valuable, in terms of gameplay, your work can be to the player. That’s one of the many ways developers can surprise their players with every wildcard in their hand, and while the player thinks they are coming to the end, you bring in the next big surprise.
This is essentially how my Boomerang X preview experience turned out, and if you’d like to get more details about this interesting indie from Dang!, allow me to tell you why I enjoyed it and where it needs some work.
Boomerang X is all about an action-packed fast-paced shooting experience where you are going to enjoy every challenge that the game has prepared for you. Think of a Doom Eternal but without the story. In my experience, people barely play Doom Eternal for its story anyway. It’s all about those crazy demon-filled scenes where you have to use dozens of skills and abilities to tear the monsters into pieces.
Boomerang X delivers a very budget-friendly version of Doom Eternal, but it tries its best to keep the level of entertainment at the same pace to which the developers have successfully accomplished.
A Master Class of Weapon Design
Instead of featuring dozens of weapons with various functionalities that enable multiple ways to encounter and kill your enemies, Boomerang X does the job with a single weapon. An X-shaped boomerang is all you have in this game to overcome the challenges, and you will always be surprised by the new upgrade that the weapon receives at the beginning of every new chapter.
Your boomerang enables you to shoot, teleport, slow down time, and trigger some special abilities. All of these upgrades come in very handy when you encounter a new challenge. Sometimes, these powerful upgrades become a little too essential that finishing a chapter seems impossible without the them.
The more you play the game, the harder challenges become. Level design in Boomerang X is simple. Every time that your boomerang receives an upgrade, you face a number of tasks in various locations, where you have to defeat waves of enemies and get the pass to further yourself along in the game.
The level design is more like stage-based mobile games in how every new season brings new enemies and abilities. The developers did a particularly great job at adding in a new variety of foes after the beginning of every new chapter.
There Needs to Be Some Tweaks
Gameplay-wise, my hopes for Boomerang X is that when the full version launches, it can still maintain its entertainment factor and won’t need too much tuning or tweaking. But as it stands, the game has some issues on the technical side.
Hopefully, the developers will have enough time to polish the game off and get rid of its bugs that include the occasional frame-drops, but for a fast-paced experience like Boomerang X, even minor technical issues could result in a loss.
Other than the technical problems, the HUD of the game also needs some tweaks. As a fan of the no-HUD idea, I admire the developer’s purpose to make the game as immersive as possible, but placing a lot of upgrades on a boomerang sometimes makes it tough to remember which button triggers a certain ability. In this case, enabling the players to have an option to turn on/off the HUD would be much of a help.
Summarizing my preview on Boomerang X, I should admit that this is a game that delivered much more than I expected in the one to two hours of my preview. The creativity behind the gameplay design is the best and biggest achievement of the developers at Dang! and I hope they don’t let some of its minor issues ruin it at launch.
Boomerang X will be available this year on PC and Nintendo Switch.
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