“Big Bumpin” Bumps Big

Fancy this, a $4 Xbox video game that is actually better than games costing 20 times as much. Believe it or not, “Big Bumpin’,” one of a trio of games released by none other than Burger King, is a blast to play.

The premise of the game is simple, you choose a character from the Burger King commercials (or “have it your way” and make your own), and drive around in a bumper car plowing into three other players. The controls are stupid easy; rotate the joystick and you move in that direction and push A for a brief boost.

Interestingly enough, this game provides four different variations on the classic knock-‘em-till-they’re-senseless bumper car. You play a sort of hot-potato game (my favorite), a king of the hill game where the hill is moving, hockey (think air hockey with bumper cars), and elimination.

Missing from all of this is simple bumper cars, where you drive in a circle and peg other players (omitted perhaps because half the fun of bumper cars in real life is giving terrible whiplash to your intended victim). Instead, the elimination game functions like “Battlebots,” with tiny arenas, pits, saws, and a lot of blowing up.

In addition to the individual games, players can enter pre-defined tournaments, where score is kept round to round, and, in single-player mode, new cars can be unlocked (they just look different; each model functions the same).

What impresses me the most about this game is how spot-on it is. It’s not fancy; the graphics are almost first-generation PS2 bad (at least they’re smooth). But, this is a game where the mechanics of driving the cars are so close to real-life that at times driving this virtual bumper car is just as frustrating as driving a bumper car in real life.

“Big Bumpin” is most fun when it can be played with four players...in fact, while testing the game with my suitemates, we may have had so much fun that we may have gotten in just a tad bit of trouble with our RA. If you don’t have three available friends to play with, the single player mode is not a let-down. The computer takes over the remaining three spots and is really hard to beat.

Despite all of this game’s strengths, there are a couple of flaws that are evident of this game’s lower production values. While you have a boost that you can use, there’s no indicator as to when the boost is available. Also, while the game offers sufficient options, those options cannot be accessed in-game. Another minor beef: the game doesn’t do a fantastic job of telling you where your character starts (leading to a few seconds of disorientation/confusion at the start of each match). After playing for a while, I realized that the game starts characters in the corner where their health meter appears, but this is not readily apparent, and on some levels, you don’t start in a corner.

Bottomline: This thing is definitely worth the $4; it’s a fun, well-made time-waster.