REVIEW: Dirty Bomb

I’m not usually one for shooting games. Trust me when I say that my average kill to death ratio has teenagers spewing profanity at me all across the internet. Why then am I about to gush romantically about how brilliant the game Dirty Bomb is?

I’ll tell you why. Kills and deaths mean very little in the grand scheme of Dirty Bomb, and that is music to my ears. Brought to us by independent British developers Splash Damage, the creators of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and published by Korean gaming powerhouse NEXON; Dirty Bomb is an objective oriented class-based shooter.

Set in a post-nuclear catastrophe-ridden London, the game revolves around two teams of mercenaries, a.k.a ‘mercs’, who either attack or defend a series of objectives. Very often these will involve blowing something up, but there is enough variety to the tasks that gameplay never feels stale. This is pretty much all the story the game gives you, and frankly I think it’s all the story that any of us need.

Players are punished for camping, not in an unfair sense but in the regard that those who play around the objectives will very often top the leaderboard. Those who choose to sit back and snipe for the entire game will find themselves picking whatever scraps are left over by the team players.

This brings me to the class system, which I have become quite enamoured with. Each class is equipped with a primary, secondary and melee weapon, two abilities and a set of perks which can be unlocked through items called loadout cards.

For example, Proxy is equipped with a shotgun, a pistol and a cricket bat as her default gear. She also has two abilities, one which allows her to complete objectives twice as fast as everyone else, and another which allows her to place proximity mines. By using the in-game currency you can purchase loadout cards for any class, unlocking new weapons and up to 3 perks which improve the class passively.
There is also a fairly wide range of classes, with abilities spanning from airstrikes to sentry guns, and even the ability to revive oneself.

There’s no two ways about it – this game is FUN. So much fun. As well as the already exciting combat gameplay, there are wall jumping mechanics, with long jumping and crouch jumping included in the movement. A good player with a fast mercenary can traverse the map at a blistering pace, bouncing off walls and crouch-jumping through windows to surprise unsuspecting campers.

The icing on this already heavily garnished cake is that Dirty Bomb is free-to-play. I can already hear you whinging about micro-transactions so let me put your mind at ease: the only thing that the game requires you to purchase is the mercenaries. You start with 2, there’s always 2 more on free rotation – and it’s not unfeasible to be able to earn enough in-game currency to purchase another that you really like the look of.

And if that’s really not enough for you then just spend some real money on it you cheap bastard!