The plot is as follows: you, the player, are guilty of flying in restricted space, which is a capital offense. Your sentence is to play in the eponymous Bumper Wars until you die. If you win 15 rounds, the Zeddites (the alien race that arrested you) will be forced to set you free. Lose one round and your fate is sealed.
This game provides examples of:
- Action Survivor: You take on the role of a deliveryman for GalEx who was captured by the Zeddites for crash-landing a failing ship which they considered a grave violation of their sacred space. You have no special skills to aid you in this fight and must gradually harden yourself in the gladiatorial arenas.
- All Crimes Are Equal: The Zeddites are fans of disproportionate punishment, likely as a way to make sure the Bumper Wars have plenty of combatants. Your own crime? Crash-landing on their planet, therefore violating their sacred space.
- All There in the Manual: The readme file gives the player a useful tip: mines can be used to divert rockets that have locked on to you.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Not just the sadistic Zeddites, it seems everyone around you is evil. Justified in that you are all prisoners and likely many of them did some very evil things to end up in the Bumper Wars, but it does seem odd that you're seemingly the only one who was sentenced for circumstances outside your control.
- Ambiguous Ending: After your 15th round you are begrudgingly set free by the Zeddites. While you are able to escape their planet, the junky ship you were able to purchase is in no shape for the long journey home...but it just might get you there. The ending feels a bit like a potential sequel hook but as no second game was ever produced the player is left to write their own story.
- Balance, Speed, Strength Trio: There are nine vehicles to pick from with varying stats. Some like the Hitman and Blitz Buggy focus on being a balance of speed and firepower with moderate survivability. The Boulder Dasher and Godzilla are semitruck-like vehicles with higher defense and capacity for firepower at the cost of speed. The Juice Deuce and XLR8 focus on pure speed, being the fastest in the game but having little capacity for ammunition (save for energy but that's mostly used for turbo).
- Big "NO!": The Zeddite narrator who talks to you throughout the game gives two of these in the ending sequence.
- Boring, but Practical: The machine gun is very straightforward, firing a constant stream of damage at a target. It deals more damage the closer you are which can set you up nicely for bumping an opponent or finish off a weakened one.
- Bottomless Pits: Every arena is a floating platform suspended in the air. If you manage to drive outside the bounds of the arena you'll begin falling before being killed midair. The game's killfeed will chide you for this by saying you "tried to escape".
- Car Fu: Inspired by bumper cars, the Bumper Wars place heavy emphasis on ramming enemy vehicles with your own. Some scenarios will even strip you of your weapons meaning the only way to score kills is to ram your opponents.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Item pickups take the form of 2D sprites that are usually a black square with a colored border. The color of the border can help you quickly identify what it does even from across the map.
- Red: Ammunition for a specific weapon type, the type of which is displayed as a picture inside the box.
- Green: Health/Defensive pickups, denoted by a wrench icon for health and a unique hexagonal icon (to avoid confusing it for a health pickup) with a shield that gives you a temporary protective boost.
- Blue: Energy pickups for refilling your energy gauge.
- Combat by Champion: After winning a large number of rounds, you are sent as a representative by the Zeddites to settle a war that they've been embroiled in for a while. Despite the fact that your victory would mean the Zeddites win the war, the guard over you still taunts you before the battle and hopes for your demise.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Even though the game is deadly, it's still bumper cars but with weaponry.
- Cool Car: The game gives you 9 to choose from, each with a variety of paint jobs to suit your tastes as well.
- Crapsack World: Ahht'Zedd is depicted as a dystopian industrial hellhole ruled by sadistic aliens.
- Culture Police: The Zeddites themselves are this on a galactic scale. They also have a specific organization called the "Virtue Enforcement Squad" seemingly for this very purpose."We are the Zeddites, it is our self appointed duty to impose conformity throughout the galaxy."
- Deadly Game: The Bumper Wars themselves. Although for some reason, you don't die during the matches themselves; you only die if you run out of time and haven't killed enough opponents. It should also be noted that you respawn if you run out of health, and if one opponent car kills another, it will respawn.
- Deflector Shields: The plasma shield pickup and the power cell both give you a defensive energy shield that temporarily reduces damage.
- Determinator: You start off just trying to survive but after winning your first few rounds you make a promise to make the Zeddites pay. It is also brought up several times that your daughter is waiting for you at home and you will do anything to see her again.
- Economy Cast: There is only one voice actor for the entire game. Granted his hammy performance and smarmy demeanor made the game a lot more memorable than it would have otherwise been.
- Even Evil Has Standards: If you win all 15 rounds they let you go and let you keep the power cells you picked up and the money you earned on the side. This is actually very surprising as the Zeddites have already shown they are corrupt, deceitful, and willing to pull any dirty trick to try and kill you short of killing you directly.
- Falling Damage: Drops from too high will damage your vehicle, which happens all too often since most maps feature curved ramps with no railings and you'll be driving high speed cars.
- Fragile Speedster: The Meat Grinder, Juice Deuce, and XLR8 are all fast but fragile cars which excel at taking potshots before retreating to safety or using their superior speed and handling to ram enemy cars.
- Flying Cutlery Spaceship: The Zeddite ship seen approaching Earth in the opening has lots of sharp pointy bits for seemingly no practical purpose.
- Freeze Ray: Implied to be the case with the "cold laser". Shooting an enemy with it slows their vehicle to a crawl, allowing you to set up for a bump or allowing your rockets to catch up with them. It does do damage but it's negligible to the point of almost being a joke item.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- You're supposed to be fighting for your life in the arena but getting your car blown up is usually only a minor setback. Even in missions with limited respawns you at least get a few chances.
- In that vein, in the 14th scenario you are tasked with killing one specific driver who wronged you...which you do several times over.
- The final mission is supposed to be you against an elite corps of Zeddite drivers who are implied to be a stopgap against you winning your 15th match, yet they all still shoot at each other as much as at you.
- Genericist Government: Not much is made of the Zeddite's government structure except that it seems very authoritarian in nature, emphasizing order and conformity. The line "Zedd forbid" is dropped once hinting that Zedd might be a god of some kind that the Zeddites worship, meaning they are some kind of theocracy, but it might be a reference to the Zedd race as well. At the end of the game someone only referred to as "Commander" appears and punishes the Zeddite who has been taunting you the whole game. Is he the Commander of this specific prison cell block? The Commander of the Zeddite military? The Supreme Commander of the Zeddites themselves? We never find out.
- The Genie Knows Jack Nicholson: References are made to the Super Bowl and Martha Stewart despite the game taking place in the presumably distant future.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: One of the Zeddites you see in the opening cutscene and at every victory screen has their face shrouded in shadow with only glowing yellow eyes visible.
- Have a Nice Death: Every time you fail a mission, a Zeddite will insult you. Examples:We expected to feast on your pointless valor, but you give us only a light snack!
We expected no more from you, human.
Next time, try harder. OOP! There is no "next time".
The curtain descends early on your pathetic little tragedy.
Congratulations! Ignominy is yours!
You crumble under pressure like a dessicated insect! Begone!- Also of note are the sarcastic death announcements, particularly when it's a self inflicted one.
(X) should be more careful with rockets.
(X) tried to break the wall.
(X) forgot about their own mine.
(X) caught (Y)'s rocket.
(X) failed to disarm (Y)'s mine. - Good is Not Nice: You gradually become this as you're subjected to the Bumper Wars. You never lose sight of your daughter at home, but you stop feeling bad about gunning down the other prisoners pretty quick.
- Hitscan: The machine gun locks on to a target and will instantly deal damage when fired. The damage is subject to fall off over distance, meant to represent the machine gun missing most of its shots.
- Homing Projectile: The rockets will automatically seek out targets and pursue them relentlessly until they make contact, crash into a wall, or run out of fuel. You'll know if one is after you as you get a text warning and an alarm klaxon that gets faster the closer it gets.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Where does your car store all the bullets, land mines, and rockets (not to mention the power cells that are nearly as big as your vehicle)?
- Invisible Wall: Downplayed. The edges of many arenas do have a slightly visible barrier. They do keep you from launching yourself out of bounds but usually only at ground level. Once you get up onto an upper level you'll find there's often a way to launch yourself off into the abyss below.
- Ironic Echo: In the intro sequence, the Zeddite narrator says that "Whoever offends the Zeddites will pay, and pay, and PAY!" At the end, he tells the Zeddite Commander that, to avoid his own punishment, he and his crew will pay anything. "Please, we'll pay! And pay, and pay, and pay!"
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The only energy weapon in the game is far outclassed in damage by the machine gun, the mines, the missiles, and even just straight up ramming the enemy.
- Knight Templar Parent: No one has managed to survive long enough to earn their freedom in the Bumper Wars, but to make it home to your daughter you will do anything.
- Large Ham: The Zeddite who taunts you before each level, insults you when you lose, and tells you not to get your hopes up when you win.
- Mana Meter: The blue energy gauge at the bottom of the HUD represents a shared resource between your turbo and cold laser. Both are replenished by collecting the energy pickup (represented by a blue square with a radioactive symbol) or by collecting a power cell.
- Mighty Glacier: The Boulder Dasher and Godzilla are both semitruck style cars with low speed but high durability. They also carry large reserves of ammunition allowing you to dole out waves of rockets and mines. If you can get one to ram into an enemy car it's nearly always a guaranteed kill. You'll really feel that lack of acceleration when you hit an incline though.
- My Friends... and Zoidberg: "Gentlemen, start your engines! ...Oh, you, too, microbe."
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Zeddite who has been taunting you the whole game suddenly sounds very nervous when you start your 14th match.
- Prison Changes People: In the early story screens you are depicted as bewildered and naïve. You are bullied by a larger inmate with more matches won, get double-crossed by a guard who promised you a transfer, and generally seem to be public enemy number one wherever you go. Gradually as you win more and more rounds you seem to build your resolve and confidence. This culminates in you taking revenge on a 13-timer who stole your power cells and challenging the Zeddites themselves in the final arena.
- Prisoner's Work: Inbetween matches you are sentenced to work in gas mines and later get transferred to a factory that actually makes the Bumper Wars cars.
- Power Glows: Picking up a plasma shield pickup or power cell will cause your car to glow.
- Ramming Always Works: Bumping remains one of the highest damaging attacks even after you have access to all the weapons the game has on offer.
- The Right of a Superior Species: The Zeddite overseeing your punishment constantly talks down to you and clearly seems to think you are inferior to the Zeddites.
- Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Zeddites are obsessed with keeping things in order and what small tidbits of worldbuilding you get in the mission briefings characterize them as an authoritative state with a penchant for punishment. References are made to "Zedd" who may either be a deity or their grand ruler.Zeddite: Someone's got to enforce a little order out there...well don't they? WELL DON'T THEY!?"
- Scoring Points: A mission objective for you is sometimes to score enough points in a given time limit, but your score is also tallied in total at the end of the game. A hall of fame accessible on the main menu also lets you see the highest scores you (or anyone else who has finished the game on your computer) have achieved.
- Spiteful Suicide: Averted. It's mentioned in the story screen after you've just helped the Zeddites win a war by acting as their champion that you were tempted to throw the match so they'd lose. Throwing the match would mean letting yourself be killed either by the other combatants or the Zeddites themselves.
- Splash Damage: Both the rockets and the mines deal more damage the closer you are to them. Notably they'll do damage to you as well if you're too close to the blast zone, making them a poor choice for close combat.
- Starter Equipment: The Blitz Buggy is the only option available to you in the beginning mission. It is an all around okay vehicle but has nothing to make it shine and is outclassed in almost every stat by the Hitman (the second car you unlock). Even the AI rarely use it outside the first few scenarios and if they do you'll find them easy pickings.
- Stock Scream: One of the songs in the soundtrack uses a sample of the Howie Long Scream, albeit in a stuttered fashion.
- Title Drop: From the intro sequence: "The rebellious everywhere shall know the horrors of... the Wheel of Ferris; the Barrel O' Fun; and our darkest triumph of all: BUMPER WARS!"
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: Inverted. The pickups in the arenas during Tournament mode are for the player alone. It's not clear how enemy ammunition and energy are dealt with, but the only way for them to heal is to respawn.
- Video-Game Lives: Some scenarios give you limited "vehicles" to respawn with instead of a time limit.
- Villainous Breakdown: The Zeddite is left sputtering and incredulous after you've won your 15th round. Shortly after your victory his Commander shows up and he's left groveling for mercy.
- Worth Living For: Your motivation for survival all rests on your hope of seeing your daughter again.
