Boomerang X Review :: Slice N Dice and Everything Nice

Let’s be honest, 2021 has been an amazing year for me. I have been playing really good games that absolutely suit my type and are proving to be a much-needed break from the current meta of cash-grab games. Boomerang X is another gem of a game released just the other day. Released a day before my birthday, this first person…thrower(?) puts you in a dramatic environment with superhuman powers and a small shuriken that has slain over 1000 demons in my playthrough.

You don’t want to miss out on this one, trust me. Ready? Let’s dive in

The Thing Goes Skrrrr (Quite Literally)

Equipped with a lethal weapon that looks like a Shuriken-ish boomerang, you set out on a journey to reclaim a corrupted land. Before we get into the story, let’s focus on what makes this game a truly mind-blowing experience.

After each level, you’ll receive an upgrade that further allows you to mix up strategies and abilities to better fend off enemies. The idea of the game is simple, you’re on limited health and you’ll be swarmed by enemies that attack in hordes. Your task is to either eliminate all the threats or particularly eliminate the ones marked. Simple? You bet.

Coming to abilities, you’ll unlock a special ability that I like to call ‘The Buddha Palm’. More like the force from Star Wars, you can slap the air to quite literally annihilate every single enemy in your FOV. Although to earn this ability, you need to do a double kill from a single throw, but when you’re being swarmed by a storm of enemies, it happens on its own.

Along with attacking abilities, you’ll gain health and passive abilities too.  After you’ve performed 3 mid-air kills, you’ll gain a badass drop shockwave. So if you’re about to stomp on stacked-up crawlers or dashing through a flying beast, this is your ticket to annihilation.

Apart from extra abilities, your default boomerang has 3 functions – attack, recall, and it also helps you move around the map. After you’ve thrown your boomerang in a certain direction, either you can call it back, or call yourself to it. This mobility experience becomes quite important towards the end game as well.

Aesthet(h)ic(c)s

Speaking of level design and the structure of the game. Let me make a bold claim-  you rarely get to see such a good-level design these days. Keeping the standards high, the game interconnects all the places you’re visiting and each level has been constructed like a passion project without compromising anything.

What makes Boomerang X special is the beautiful moment just before the chaos, during the chaos, and the pin-drop silence that follows. Boomerang X is a phenomenal and aesthetically pleasing fast-paced game that had me hooked from the first minute till the credits section.

With new enemy types and biome introduced at every level, there was something new to learn all the time. Boomerang X never felt repetitive, proving me wrong.

While the lore and story didn’t really hook me much, or to be honest I wasn’t able to make out much of what was going on, I had my focus entirely on the gameplay. But as to summarize what I was able to understand, a species of bugs and grasshoppers once lived on this island and were trying to dive deeper into the secrets they shouldn’t interfere with. But they ended up triggering something bad and their kind seized to exist. The island is now taken over by corrupted entities all over and it is only you, who can bring an end to it.

The AI seems to bug at certain times but has been majorly improved since the early phases of the game. Although there are rarely any times there is a visual or performance error, you might need to restart the game if you’re suffering heavy dips in frames. Apart from such issues, I wasn’t able to spot any major bugs in the game and my experience has been flawless along the way.

Real Talk

Long Story Short, Boomerang X is a  fast-paced slice n dice experience. A single run lasts around 2-3 hours, but it definitely feels like more. You can always come back to ‘git gud’ as well. Personally, the amount of content is perfect and the effort that has been put into the game is worth praising. If you think your mind can cope up with working fast and dealing with 100+ enemies at a time, Boomerang X might be the best pick for you.