de Blob makes a big SPLAT!
De Blob is ready to paint the town red or blue or yellow and every color in-between with this release from THQ. De Blob is a colorful romp of an adventure game. Does this platformer give Mario a run for his money on his own system or does the game make just a big splat?
De Blob takes place in Chroma City where everything is all bright and colorful until one day the I.N.K.T. Corporation invades the city and steals all of the color from the city. The I.N.K.T. Corporation has also enslaved Chroma City inhabitants to do the color less work of pushing buttons for the corporation. Not only that but after they have sucked up all of the color they leave behind a city that is just black and white. You play as Blob a silent protagonist who with the help from the Color Revolution to try and overthrow the corporation and reclaim the city. That is the whole story of the game. The story doesn’t help to push you through the game at all. After the first level you don’t care too much about any of the characters or their struggle to overthrow the I.N.K.T.’s.
The game is broken up into a handful of levels, with each level containing challenges that are presented by members of the Color Revolution. Each member has a certain challenge type that they give you. These challenges range from coloring specific items a certain color to doing checkpoint races to defeating I.N.K.T. soldiers. These challenges never change, no matter what level you are on. This makes the game feel boring and stale after the first couple of levels. I wish they would have had more variety to the challenges instead of having the same ones over and over again.
Also every level is timed, you have so long until the I.N.K.T. soldiers come after you but you are able to collect time by killing other soldiers and coloring specific items. I don’t understand the whole time limit, I never ran out of time. I would finish a level and still have 35 minutes left. I don’t understand what the time limit was supposed to do. Not only that but you are not able to save mid-level. You have to finish a level before you can save. Each level depending on how much of a completionist you are can take you upwards of 30 to 40 minutes. It is very inconvenient and I would end up leaving my Wii on to take a break or to run an errand.
Blob is able to change to different colors depending on which color he picks up. There are three main colors you are able to collect in the game; blue, red, and yellow. You can also mix these three colors to make a new color like when you mix yellow and red you turn orange. When you turn to a color, Blob is able to transform the environment to what color he is. Whatever he rolls into he can change its color. I enjoyed this aspect of the game. It’s like painting with numbers but you can change the numbers to whatever paint color you want.
You use the Wii mote and nun chuck to control blob. You move him around with the thumb stick and you jump when you flick the Wii mote up into the air. The controls are not as precise as you would want in a platform game. Blob sometimes doesn’t jump when you flick the Wii mote. Blob is able to jump and stick to a wall and roll across it for a little bit before he starts sliding down it. Well I would go and jump on top of a building and I would just stick to the wall. Then you have to get back down and try again. Or when you are trying to jump to a platform and blob jumps too early and then he ends up stuck to the side of the platform and you can’t jump anywhere else except to just fall to your death. The controls are so frustrating and you can never rely on them to do what you want them to do.
The look of the game is defiantly one of its strong points. The way the color changes the environment to whatever color you currently are. The game is bright and colorful and it catches anyone’s eye that happens to look at it. The boss battle at the end serves as the games only boss battle. The boss battle was fun and it changed the gameplay up from the rest of the game. They needed more boss battles then just the one.
In the end De Blob falls short of everything on every level expect for the look of the game. The use of color and the environment look great. It is just too bad everything else felt bad. With the bad platforming and the unresponsive controls brings a lot of frustration to the game. The game is already tough enough to sit through and play due to its lack of gameplay options. The game feel like it took 20 hours to complete but in all actuality it took about half that to beat. Let’s hope that the sequel will turn out better.
