iPhone App Reviews

POV: Bomb Shot Recipes

Swain Valasek | Sep 2, 2009 Entertainment, POV

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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* “POV” (Point of View) is a new feature that we’re testing out *

Zenux Lab’s rating: 9.0
IAR’s rating: 5.0

Bomb Shot Recipes from Zenux Lab is a fun little app to help you get smashed drinking bomb shots with your friends (or alone if that’s how you roll).  If you’ve been out of the loop on this term, a bomb shot is very simple in concept.  You take a shot glass full of hard liquor and drop it into a glass filled partway with something neutral like cola, fruit juice or an energy drink (called the ‘wash’).  Some bomb shots are meant to be imbibed ‘clean’ wherein the shot glass contents are left intact when dropped into the glass while others are ‘dirty’ where the shot glass contents get partially mixed with the wash or even poured directly into it.  As you can imagine, people have gotten insanely creative about bomb shots over the years.  Bomb Shot Recipes aims to corral this favored pastime right onto your iPhone so let’s see what the developer has to say followed by the opinions of yours truly.

Zenux Lab’s summary:

What Bomb Shot Recipes does:

Do you like parties? Are you sick and tired of boring parties and looking for something funny?
Then, here is the application you must have!

Bomb Shot Recipes is a very original application which introduces you to the new world of drink.
You must be amazed to see how exciting and funny your drinking can be.
With just a few basic ingredients (beer, whiskey, vodka, coke, and vitamin drink)
you can make more than 20 kinds of bomb shots. When buzzed, please don’t be bothered to read
the recipes since very vivid videos for most of bomb shots are provided. Plus, the exciting popping game
helps you to decide who to drink.

With Bomb Shot Recipes in your iPhone and iPod touch, there is no boring party for you anymore!

What this app does right:

-Easy and clear recipes
-Filters to narrow down available bomb shots
-Vivid and high-quality videos to show how to make fantastic bomb shots

Where this app needs to improve:

More videos and recipes.

Features and improvements planned for the future:

We plan to add 20 more bomb shot recipes.

IAR’s take:

There’s a slight irony involved with apps that help you get drunk by passing around your expensive iPhone like a beer coaster.  Nevertheless, if you’re ok with a little Heineken on your iPhone I could see this app being a lot of fun with a group of friends at a favorite watering hole.  The color scheme used throughout the app is festive and sets the right mood, the videos are as good as advertised and the developer obviously had a good time making it.  There are a total of 6 ingredients included in the release version: vodka, whiskey, beer, cola, energy drink (think Red Bull) and believe it or not a raw egg.  With these 6 ingredients the app provides recipes for 18 drinks (not over 20 as mentioned above).  The recipes are easy and clear as noted, with one caveat: English isn’t the first language of the developer so you’ll have to forgive a number of spelling, semantic and grammar errors throughout.  It doesn’t detract too much from the fun of the app (some might say it adds to it!) but it would be great to see it polished up a little.  Most of the drinks include a video, the exceptions being Diamond which refers you to the vid for Swirl Shot, Hydrogen Bomb which refers you to the vid for Atomic Bomb and Chain Bomb which just has no video period (on purpose apparently).  As you browse the drinks you can mark favorites (nice), filter recipes by ingredient, pull up a random shot (when you just have no time to fiddle about) and play a simple drinking game.  The Dynamic Bomb maybe shouldn’t have a video as it’s the one using the raw egg, nassssssty.  In the game feature you’re presented with 6, 12 or 20 bottles and the intention is to pass the phone around and each person ‘opens’ a bottle by touching it.  If a beer bottle is picked a humorous foamy animation is displayed and you just keep passing until someone gets the bomb bottle at which point they have to down whatever shot was prepared for the loser.  It’s not incredibly exciting and won’t supplant ‘quarters’ or any other favorite drinking game but its inclusion here is welcome.

There’s no question this app needs more recipes and videos.  Not only are there literally hundreds of bomb shots in existence but this app doesn’t even include the most famous one in the world, the Jager Bomb.  Popular ones like the Irish Car Bomb and Cherry Bomb are also missing; basically this app is just a starter kit.  That said, what’s here is nicely done and if the same quality is upheld while adding as many new shots to the library as possible, this app could be a great source for bomb shot aficionados.  20 more recipes are planned and that will be a huge boost to the amount of content at present so hopefully that’s already in the works.

No real props and flops section this time, just 1 big, honking flop.  Basically, every time I watch videos in 1 section, say Favorites, if I then switch to any other section, videos will not play.  This is just about a deal-breaker and the main reason for the low rating.  Not much point whipping out this app at the bar when you have to constantly futz around and/or restart it just to get the videos to play.  The rating would go up markedly with this bug being addressed and the addition of more recipes.

So there you have it, a fun drinking app held back to some degree by a lack of content and to a freakin’ large degree by the aforementioned issue with video playback.

Head to the comments section for a chance to score a promo code, offered up gratis by the generous developer!

* POV is sponsored by the developer

Tags: $1.99, bomb shots, drink recipes, shots, Swain Valasek