Thanks to BBG Entertainment for the review code
Title: Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 08/28/2025
Prelude
We’ve covered Boulder Dash a couple of times here on SFG, thanks to the C64 original being a favorite of mine back when C64 titles hit the Wii Virtual Console. I always enjoyed the very tricky logic behind that game, along with the devilish puzzles that could take forever only for you to mess up at the very end. Was it unfair? Sure! Did it make pulling off the puzzles even more satisfying? Absolutely!
Various Boulder Dash sequels would try to mess with the formula, add in new level packs and gimmicks, and whether it was the Mobile-aligned Boulder Dash 30th or the hideous looking Boulder Dash Deluxe, I generally enjoyed both of them, although not nearly as much as my beloved Boulder Dash XL 3D. Well, now the 40th anniversary has come, with BBG not just bringing back classic Boulder Dash 1 levels yet again, but also the levels from BDII and BDIII, along with a ton of newer stages, including some very popular fan worlds retooled in a style very similar to that original game.
Does this giant grab bag of puzzles offer the variety needed to make yet another Boulder Dash title worth picking up? Well, let’s dive in and find out!
Presentation
Right away I had a huge sigh of relief looking at the game, since the character options you have to choose from look far better than the Rockford from the Deluxe. Seriously, that was terrifying. Now you have various classic Rockfords to choose from, whether that be the original design from the C64 games, scrapped concept art variants finally realized, or assorted versions from key art. It isn’t fully comprehensive, since you don’t have the funny robot guy from XL-3D or the cat-thing from EX, but these Rockford designs are pretty good and all represent the classic era remarkably well.
The menus are pretty easy to navigate too, working either with the touch screen or the menus. They definitely were made with a mobile/touch screen in mind, and the construction mode is way better with the touch controls than using the sticks as a result. Still, the in-game visuals are pretty decent, with various worlds offering a few different cave designs that look nice enough, with the C64 recreations in particular being really spot on. I’m talking almost 1:1 but in widescreen, and you can even apply a fake CRT effect to the retro stages, although it’s a pretty weak one, and you can even switch to the Atari color palette if you so wish.
The music might be the weirdest part of the game. The level select theme is a pretty catchy remix of that C64 title screen tune, but the actual stages just use a randomized playlist of new tunes, and they’re incredibly bizarre, and loud. Some songs are louder than others, and most of them sound unfitting when doing the actual puzzle solving. The C64 stages all use a pretty accurate reproduction of the title screen song, even though the original games had no music, though you can disable the in-game music if you so wish, which is how I ultimately played the newer levels, too.
Lastly are the very weird performance quirks. Even on the Switch 2, the game has a weird habit of slowing down significantly when a lot of diamonds/objects are in the level. As you pick up more of the diamonds, the level gains more frames, which doesn’t seem to make any sense to me at all with how both Switch 1 and Switch 2 do the same thing, despite the latter having more horsepower and how it seems like the Switch 1 shouldn’t even be struggling like this.
It makes me wonder if this was some sort of intentional slowdown in the game itself to prevent players from making absurdly complicated levels in the editor that could mess with the game’s performance to the point of crashing it, but the main stages suffer from this as well, and it really bogs down the experience. Still, the controls remain effective despite this setback, so I was able to generally deal with this quirk even on my Switch 2 to play the levels without the framerate killing me.
Gameplay
Boulder Dash is a pretty simple game, as it was back in the early 80s, with the main goal of each stage being to collect the required amount of gems to open an exit door and get out of the stage without dying or getting trapped. Even in 40th anniversary, this core loop remains pretty much unchanged, and even in the modern levels a lot of the design is done more closely to the vintage style than more recent entries, which gave you various powerups to let you get out of jams. Not here, you have to do it the old fashioned way.
After a pretty well-made tutorial world that shows you the ropes in excellent fashion, you’re free to choose between any world you choose, with no unlocking required. You do have to clear some stages to unlock later ones in a world, usually opening up the next three from that number onward, but either way you have a lot of flexibility in jumping into the world of your choosing, which is pretty nice. That also means if you happen to get stuck on a current world, you could just move onto another one before coming back to the one you had troubles with.
Upon jumping into a level, the controls are very simple. You move with the left stick or D-Pad, and reach out in one of four directions with the right stick, which can be used to collect diamonds nearly or dislodge dirt to help manipulate boulder drops without moving in that tile. With no powerups, undos, or other techniques this time around, it’s just you and your arms to collect the gems and get to the goal! The same sort of simplistic fun from the original C64 games, which helps those 60 retro levels fit in here rather nicely.
The worlds are varying degrees of tricky, with the first two being pretty manageable once you get the hang of things, but most of the others really put your thinking cap to the test, with a lot of them requiring some advanced techniques such as exploding enemies with a boulder to blow a hole open in a wall, or manipulating growing amoeba to create more diamonds upon their entrapment. Some of the fan worlds such as DangerDash are also pretty tricky, but with a shocking degree of polish considering how they’re made by fans, and are equally fun worlds to try and tackle.
Of course, even with the huge amount of stages and 3-star completions to try and take on in the base game, there’s a level editor here, and while it controls OKish on the Switch’s touchscreen with the buttons, trying to operate it in docked mode is a big pain, along with navigating the online level portal. For some baffling reason, even navigating the list of online levels is clunkier than it should be, and quickly reveals the fatal flaw with this level editor. You can upload a stage without having to beat it. A bunch of junk test levels were uploaded online, being how this game is new and all, and more than one of them just lacked an exit condition. So that means a bunch of stages are unwinnable and you might end up downloading a tricky looking one that’s actually impossible, and you’d be none the wiser.
There is a five star rating system to try and mitigate this, and you can sort levels by their star ranking, but even still, this is only a tiny remedy for an otherwise fatal flaw, which completely killed any motivation I had to bother with the online levels. Still, even when I did find a few decent ones, I also noticed a flaw with downloading stages that left me scratching my head, with the game loving to overwrite my previously downloaded stage no matter what I did. Despite several slots being opened in the custom levels menu, I just couldn’t stop having a downloaded level overwrite my previous one, leaving me stuck with two.
Whether this is just a bug with me or yet another major issue with the level editor, it really damaged a key feature of the overall package, and if it wasn’t for the sheer amount of pre-made stages I’d even consider this flaw a game killer.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary is a fantastic set of levels that properly pay homage to the gem collecting classic, mostly bogged down by the weird performance quirks along with a disaster of a construction mode. Yes, they are very very hard and very long, and yes, it can be infuriating to make it nearly to the end of a stage only for you to fail, but the satisfaction of finally solving the stages is still a great aspect to these stages, and with a lot of these levels being really really good, there’s still a ton of fun to be had with the 40th anniversary.
Not to mention even just as a compilation of BDI-III stages if you want to stick strictly to retro, they are amazingly well done and easily the best way for a modern player to get into the classic stages, despite how infuriating they can be. (and terrible in the case of BDIII) It’s just a shame the construction mode is so bad to the point you’re better off not playing any custom levels, since I cannot fathom why mandating you be able to solve them wasn’t implemented in any way, shape or form. Completely ruins the whole point of the mode and makes it very easy to download a slop level that just wastes your time.
Still, overall this is a great celebration of Boulder Dash’s anniversary, even if I do wish it had a bit more polish to it and had a much better construction mode than whatever the heck we got dealt with in the end. From excellent retro recreations to fun newer stages, there’s tons of tricky brainstorming puzzles to solve in this game, easily being the best set of Boulder Dash levels on Switch to date. It’s just a shame the performance is a little wonky still.
I give Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary Edition a 7 out of 10.