As NintendoGal readers will probably note, I’ve been very excited for the release of de Blob; I’ve had my eye on it since the early days of its conception, and my hands-on time with it at E3 exacerbated my excitement to very high levels. I’ve finally gotten my hands on the final product, and it’s just as satisfying as I had hoped it would be. Though a couple of minor control issues may get in the way on occasion, de Blob is definitely one of the best games to hit the Wii this year.
de Blob has an unassuming, simple premise. The INKT Corporation has overtaken Chroma City, stealing all its color and trapping its citizens in ink-producing suits. As Blob, a rather mysterious creature with special paint powers, you must re-paint Chroma City and drive the evil IKNT away. The gameplay is admittedly quite simple as well, which makes the allure of de Blob an even more amazing feat. About 80% of your time in the story mode is spent running into buildings and painting them funky colors, and while you’ll run into some platforming sections as well, it is close to as simple as it sounds, in essence. Developer Blue Tongue has done an amazing job making this as entertaining as they can; with each building you bump into, vivid color spreads through it from the point you touched it accompanied by a funky art style, and depending on what color you are a different musical instrument will contribute loudly to the game’s soundtrack. Each level starts out as almost entirely white, and nearly silent, and also you can tell the sun isn’t exactly shining bright. As you pick up paintbots and get to painting, however, the buildings jump out with vivid colors, and the soundtrack starts jumping, and you can truly feel Chroma City come to life.
This is one game in which production values really need to be very high, and luckily Blue Tongue has done exactly that. Even after painting your level a rainbow of randomly placed colors, including brown, the world looks brilliant and fantastic. The soundtrack is a sort of modern jazz fusion which really fits with the laid-back gameplay and loud colors, and it’s entertaining hearing different instruments come into play depending on your color; red is saxophone, blue is jazz guitar, green is electric keyboard, and brown brings in some turntable sounds. It’s surprisingly satisfying to fill up on color and go painting rows of buildings, or jumping across rooftops, because the environment responds so well; in fact, de Blob is one of a few games that manages to bring out the completionist in me like few other games can. I found that for most of the game’s ten levels, I was spending upwards of an hour in each one, painting every building I could and freeing all the Raydians for bonus points. Blue Tongue has managed to make a very simple gameplay concept extremely entertaining and has capitalized on it, something that I think more game developers could benefit from.
Which is not to say that that’s all there is to the game, although they’ve included a Free Paint option if painting really is all you want to do (and if it is, I can sympathize). The story mode amps itself up with numerous enemies and missions for you to accomplish; most of the missions are centered around painting, of course, but it adds elements of puzzle and strategy to your painting, to give you more of a sense of accomplishment. There are four different types of mission: painting missions, wherein you must paint a certain number of buildings certain colors in a time limit; landmark missions, where you must collect a certain amount of a certain color to apply it to a large building within a time limit; combat missions, wherein you must destroy a certain number of enemy troops in a time limit; and race missions, where you must follow markers from one part of the level to another within a time limit. If you’re noticing a pattern, good for you; pretty much everything in the story mode of de Blob is timed, including the overall level itself. As you complete missions, destroy larger enemies, or free Raydians (the citizens of Chroma City), you’ll earn extra time with which to complete the level. If you run out of time for the whole level, or run out of lives, it’s game over and you have to start the level again.
Combat is not particularly difficult either, and most engagements end pretty quickly, as you imagine they would when a huge blob lands on top of a soldier about one-twelfth its size. Combat, like the missions, gets rather strategy-based as the game progresses; you’ll end up needing specific colors, or specific sizes, to take out the troops, while earlier in the game you can pretty much squish them over and over until they’re all gone. It’s nothing particularly mind-bending, but it’s still a bit satisfying watching your enemies turn into uninformed black smears on the pavement.
The other major element to the single-player mode is the inclusion of speed missions. Unlike the main levels, wherein you can generally take your time wandering around and painting, these missions give you a specific task, a path to follow, and a rather strict time constraint that’s usually in the area of two minutes. These levels are much more platformer-oriented than the normal levels, and I’m sure more hardcore game players will appreciate them. In later levels, you’ll end up pulling off well-timed wall jumps and mad rushes to the exit pool, and I ended up failing my fair share of these.
As you play through all the levels, you’re encouraged to go for numerous awards for varying levels of completion. You’ll get awards for painting a majority of the buildings, all the trees, all the billboards, rescuing all the Raydians, and there’s even an award for snagging the blimp that’s flying around every level. Playing through the level completing things and getting a high score will net you a gold medal, which will unlock goodies and speed missions in the normal levels, and bonus galleries and movies in the speed missions. Admittedly, once you’ve beaten the speed missions, going for completeness in the story levels is generally its own reward. For some this may not be a problem, for others they may not want to go back.
Lastly, this game has some multiplayer modes as well, based around, surprise surprise, painting buildings. Being the friendless misanthrope I am, I had to try these out without properly having two people there, but luckily I was able to grasp what the modes were. The first, Paint Match, is basically a game of graffiti, wherein up to four players try to paint as many buildings as they can in their color (while trying to drain color out of their opponents). The second mode is basically like King of the Hill, wherein only one player has the right to paint buildings at any one time, and the other players must try and snag it. The third, Blob Race, took a bit to figure out. As it turns out, only a handful of buildings are paintable to start; each building can only be painted once, but the more you paint, the more buildings are available for painting. They all seem pretty similar, but in a Tony Hawk kind of way, and I’m sure they’ll end up entertaining the Blob-loving crowd.
While I could sing the praises of this game for a while, I do have to mention that this title does have some issues. One gripe I’m sure many will have is that while the game is fun, it’s also very easy; I never had much trouble completing anything but the hardest missions in the game, even when trying for a gold medal. More pressing, though, are some control issues for the game. Jumping is handled by flicking the Wii Remote downward; while I didn’t have trouble with this, other people have reported that this makes their wrist ache, but even beyond this, I had trouble jumping sometimes. There were instances where Blob was just barely airborne, but you couldn’t tell, and it ended up with me falling to my doom because I thought I could jump. Another issue I had was with the wall run system; while most of the time wall running works fine, there will be instances where you try to jump for something, but you’ll be hindered by sticking to a nearby wall, annoyingly. Lastly, the automatic lock-on has some issues. While you may be able to change targets with the Z-trigger, you’ll often be moving too fast to notice until you jump on a canister of paint, making you the wrong color for whatever task you wanted to do. So there are some issues that will hinder your experience, but they certainly won’t create a major obstacle to your enjoyment.
Overall, de Blob is a game whose simple premise is executed with brilliance, making it fun to do the simplest things in the game. It’s also going to keep you occuiped for a fair amount of time, about ten hours or so if you played it like I did, which isn’t the maximum. For its skilled mix of style and substance, de Blob gets a 9.0 out of 10, and the title of "funkiest game of the year". Give it a try; I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
