Boomerang X offers a specific, thrilling power fantasy of speed as players use a magical boomerang to zip around increasingly complex combat puzzles that offer little to no excess in a colorful, stylized world.
Boomerang X is one of the few games I’ve reviewed having virtually no previous knowledge of it.
I was completely unaware that at some point in time my character would be throwing around a mystical boomerang and teleporting to it mid-air.
As its title suggests, Boomerang X cuts to the chase fairly quickly. The boomerang is the only weapon players will use and it looks like an “X” with its sharp tendrils spinning towards phantom beasts at an unknown velocity. Looking back, I can’t imagine what else developer DANG! could have called it.
Throughout the entire game, the player character’s arms are their only visible part, looking like they belong to a bandaged mummy. Decadent gardens and subterranean mines once housed by a mantis-like race provide the narrative for the game. There’s even a cute dimension-hopping millipede that befriends players.
Never would I have thought Boomerang X was an arena shooter. Or a game that will inevitably be gobbled up by speedrunners.
On the game’s Steam splash page, nearly all these bits of information are explained with a gif or text blurb. Yet here I was, completely unaware of what I was getting into.
Boomerang X is not flashy excess. There are no untold depths to explore. Superfluous mechanics won’t be found here. The game will take most people 3-4 hours to see from beginning to end. If any part of the game, whether it be image, video, or curiosity–has piqued your interest, then you may already be sold.
It took me about 10-15 minutes–about the point where players are granted the ability to teleport to their boomerang after having thrown it–to be all in.
Escalation is the key term in Boomerang X. The game starts out almost humbly, offering almost no story outside of environmental inference and mechanics blissfully simple. And then it escalates.
The first arena only pits players against crawling spiders. The next, some flying pests are tossed in. Later on, ones that spew venom. In between, corpses and statues of mantis-like creatures. After that, the bottom of an arena is full of some damaging substance. Coming up, waterfalls of lava cascading from the ceiling, pooling onto the entire floor.
Boomerang X starts out with a simple lesson. Each subsequent arena adds a new fraction, adjective, punctuation mark. Gameplay is a formula meant to solve increasingly difficult quandaries. What was once multiplication becomes algebra, then calculus. While it may not be entirely subtle, it’s completely seamless… almost, but more on that later.
The mummy player washes up on a beach in an unknown land, their ship presumably wrecked by a large, spinning figure in the water that looks like a buzzsaw. Moving forward, players find a boomerang stuck in a bench in a room. Over the course of the game, Boomerang X moves players through mysterious corridors and obtusely-named locales meant to invoke a deeper meaning. It’s fairly obvious that these mantis creatures were the dominant species and that the evil force players are fighting against may have caused their demise. An adorable millipede creature named Tepan claims to have met these characters who are no longer around, sprinkling just a bit of exposition and lore into the game.
There’s not much left to Boomerang X‘s story outside of what a player may infer from Tepan’s speeches, the names of arenas, and what the developers might be trying to translate with visuals. Surprisingly, it works. I found myself invested in the world and what fate it suffered. How did these mantis dudes infuse weapons with magic powers and how did non-mantis mummy guy end up here? A few questions will have answers but Boomerang X is pretty open-ended, allowing the gameplay to do the talking.
Most will marvel at how utterly simple DANG! has designed combat in Boomerang X, only for it to feel like a complicated dance of death.
The game starts out allowing players to toss the boomerang at enemies. After cutting through an evil piece of malformed black goo, the boomerang may spin around wildly in the air, bouncing off a wall and searching for the player’s hand. It may accidentally chop another enemy in its path. Or you can try and run and jump away from the boomerang for shits and giggles as it desperately tries to get back to you.
It’s an elegantly simple move, a click of the mouse or push of a trigger.
But soon enough, nearly immediately, the boomerang takes far too long to return. Then players are granted the ability to have the boomerang instantly return to them. Quite useful because the next handful of arenas are quite large and the enemies quite plentiful. There’s no time to have a boomerang spinning around aimlessly in the wind when enemies are nipping at your heels.
Boomerang X features a small set of moves and abilities that are meant to not get in the way of tackling its frequent waves of enemies. For the sake of ease, I’ll just rattle them off here. The best part? They are all quite obvious in their execution and their usefulness. Players can wind up the boomerang so it will throw farther. A move called “flux” is earned that slows down time while the boomerang spins. Regardless of distance from the player, the boomerang can also be teleported to, as I have mentioned multiple times before. A shotgun-like spread can be fired from the hand if more than one enemy is killed in a single throw of the boomerang, eviscerating targets within close range. Kill multiple targets with that attack to activate a sniper shot that kills a target from a far distance and can often pierce others. Kill three enemies without touching the ground to earn a damaging burst that activates upon colliding with an enemy or the ground. Lastly, near the end of the game, players earn an ultimate move of sorts that charges up over time and instantly teleports to a target, killing anything in the path.
Quantifying the usefulness of these actions is all about Boomerang X‘s escalation. Imagine the game like the original incarnation of Doom and Doom Eternal. Killing is done within a space and the weapons are tools meant to shred down the opposition. While Boomerang X‘s action does unfold in a three-dimensional space, it feels akin to an Unreal Tournament or those classic id titles. There’s easily identifiable borders, boundaries, and rules. Impossibly difficult enemies or situations aren’t thrown into the mix until the player is comfortable enough to take them on.
The increasingly complex enemy and arena design accounts for this sharp, rapid improvement. Players will only encounter slower moving enemies on level ground at first. Unlock new moves one after the other and the game begins introducing enemies that can only be taken down by hitting their glowing ruby red weakpoint. Coinciding with new enemies is varying terrain, like multiple elevations to fight from or columns to interrupt the path of the boomerang.
Not every new encounter is a guarantee of something more difficult. In fact, an arena with less distractions may be that way to introduce a new enemy type or a toned-down version of an encounter that is significantly more challenging in the next arena.
Boomerang X is constantly teaching and testing players.
In one arena, the bottom of the stage was swimming with gator-like monsters that were focused on charging at the player upon landing. They died instantly and would always clutter together. It was easy to earn the scatter and sniper shots on these guys. But their purpose was a greater one than just being simple fodder. A new enemy type is introduced around this time: teleporting, poison-throwing wizards that would usually disappear right before being hit by the boomerang. The easiest way to kill them was with the sniper shot from a distance before they could disappear. However, this arena was like a well, significantly deep and not very wide. The easiest way to farm kills was to fall down to the bottom and kill the gators.
It’s somewhat difficult to visualize, just as difficult to describe. You have to play it to really understand it because Boomerang X is a wildly fast-paced game. Slowing down time and teleporting to a thrown boomerang while maintaining velocity is disorienting for a few seconds and then intensely familiar. There are moments in the game where players will stay airborne for minutes at a time, executing waves of enemies while seeking out the glowing targets that must be taken out to progress. Each new wave triggers the music to ramp up–a crescendo of Asian strings and heavy drums–intensifying the gameplay even more.
Rapidly, the blood begins to churn as the player feels like an invincible badass.
The wave-based progression used in Boomerang X focuses on players killing a handful of targets and then moving on. Not every enemy needs to be killed but often the extras allow for chain kills to earn powers. Hypothetically, an arena in the game can be completed without touching the ground and in under a few minutes, indicated by the achievements. Players earn additional hit points over the course of the game but New Game+ spins that on its head.
Often players should feel quite breathless during the latter half of Boomerang X. Mobs of enemies and arena design becomes increasingly layered to not only serve as a test of skill but to just look cool. A handful of enemies that only make a couple appearances serve as harder foes that make maneuvering around the landscape difficult. Their clever design is incorporated in just the right ways to not allow players to rest on their laurels.
This continuing escalation leads into the final two arenas of Boomerang X. At this point, there is no solid ground to land on, only precariously placed pillars and walkways. The hardest enemies zip along to prepare for the final boss encounter. And it was here that I had the slightest problem with Boomerang X.
The final boss takes place in a kind of sphere and if the player touches its perimeter, they take damage. Meanwhile, the boss is swirling around and can also damage with the slightest touch. After being damaged, shards of red crystal are sent out after the player. Taking place over multiple waves, the final boss of Boomerang X is a trying gauntlet.
To earn health back players are expected to stand still on a red platform for a few seconds. In this game, however, being stationary leads to a quick death. Plus, these one-time use health platforms are difficult to land on in the heat of battle, making them frustrating for those like me who aren’t incredibly accurate. I think DANG! could have found a better way to give health back to players who were brave enough to get it but perhaps not as insanely precise as need be.
During multiple tries at the boss I would give up if I took too much damage in the first phases, knowing I wouldn’t be able to regain enough health and headway to deal with the absolute chaos of the final phase. Here, the escalation of difficulty sharply rises and those edges cut deeply.
While I can’t say everything previously done in Boomerang X doesn’t prepare players for this final encounter, I don’t think every piece of the fight is justified. It would be one thing to have players take damage upon hitting the boss, but the arena? No thanks. DANG! never truly asks players to master velocity control with the air brake as most arenas in the game allow for slow-motion teleportation without a second thought. For this boss, there’s almost no time to to gather your wits and recover after a poor performance.
At first I blamed my use of a controller on my failings. Then I adjusted the field of depth settings, switched to a mouse and keyboard, and found less success. Surprisingly, Boomerang X is great with a controller and I didn’t want to shift away from that comfort. Thankfully, the game includes a few settings that might make things easier on players who wish to progress in the game unimpeded. And, I won’t lie, after dying in the final phase of the boss multiple times, I switched on invincibility just so I could see the satisfying end.
Boomerang X is a game of escalating skill. It starts out getting the feet wet with dazzling adrenaline. The boomerang is a thrilling, acrobatic weapon that comes alive in players’ hands. A comfortable flow of interesting and increasingly difficult challenges test the limits of what can be done with an arena shooter when gravity and guns don’t apply. Maybe the final challenges will be a little sharp for those who haven’t honed their skills to the max, but Boomerang X is also set to be a speedrunner’s paradise, broken and contorted by those who will accomplish impossible feats. But for someone like me who went in blind to Boomerang X, I can’t help but be pleased at how beautiful, fun, and ridiculous this short journey was–and how easy it will be to pick it back up again when I want to fly around like a wizard ninja.
