Bonk 3: Bonk's Big Adventure (TurboGrafx-16) review"So much like Bonk's Revenge that I was worried I got stuck in a Groundhog Day loop for a while." |
Reviewing Bonk 3: Bonk's Big Adventure is a bit tricky, if only because it breaks so little new ground. The second installment was still quite fresh in my mind when I played this one, which made the similarities even more striking. Both games are good platformers that don't quite reach the mark of greatness. Both feature the titular caveman using his head to bash through the ill-tempered King Drool III's followers. Most of the same power-ups are sprinkled through a number of levels that tend also to cover the same ground: slippery ice levels, surprisingly modern cities and other locations that often seem to have been designed to evoke feelings of deja vu among those who have played previous games in the series.
Remember back in the NES days, when Super Mario Bros. 2 was released? Before Nintendo decided to rework another game to include Mario and a few friends, the original version was essentially just a more difficult version of the first Super Mario, utilizing the same graphical style and general level designs, but ramping things up to provide a sterner challenge to players who felt the Mushroom Kingdom was a little too safe. Bonk 3 is kind of like that, but without the boost in difficulty. You could play it immediately after Bonk's Revenge and it'd feel less like an original game and more like the second half of a lengthy romp.
The main addition here is a pair of power-ups that change Bonk's size. One turns him into a super-sized man-monster capable of dwarfing nearly everything else on the screen. The other shrinks him down to a size capable of wiggling into even the most narrow of paths. Building upon that, several levels in this game are more expansive than the ones presented in prior games, offering several side paths containing various goodies that can only be accessed by shrinking. This was an improvement in my eyes, since there were a couple times when I had to put in a bit of thought to figure out just how to progress from where I was to where I needed to be in order to clear a stage.
Staff review by Rob Hamilton (January 04, 2020)
Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers. |
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