Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

A quick bit of research reveals that de Blob was actually a downloadable PC title made by some game design students.  They wanted to make a game conveying how the railroad station near Utrecht University in the Netherlands would look in 10 years.  The city loved it so much that they actually adopted the de Blob character as their city mascot!  THQ took notice and purchased the rights to develop a full game around the character.  Developer Blue Tongue Entertainment took the reigns and started immediately developing the game for the Wii, DS, and iPhone platforms.  With that much effort put in by so many people, it sets a pretty high bar for this title.  I got to take the prismatic ink blot for a spin a little early – let’s find out if it’s all jazz and color splashes, or if this game comes up drab.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up de Blob is that there is almost no color to the game.  The evil monochromatic I.N.K.T. Corporation has dispatched their police force to invade the city of Chroma, turning everyone and everything to grey. Comrade Black has squeezed every bit of life out of the city, including draining all color from every building, tree, puddle, crane, and everything in between.  The workers have devolved into mindless drones, oppressing the city residents into submission.   Thankfully de Blob has always had the dream of becoming the most famous artist in the city, and now is his opportunity to make that happen. 

de Blob won’t be taking on Comrade Black and his army completely alone.  Meeting up with the Professor, a sort of unofficial organizer of the Color Resistance and your essential guide through the game, you’ll eventually run into individual members of the resistance including the fighter Bif, ADD-riddled acrobat Zip, and the free-spirit artist Arty. These four will help you re-color the world as every level begins completely black and white.  As you complete challenges and repaint the area, it’ll take on new life as you apply crazy color schemes and patterns to every touchable surface, including the surrounding mountain range.  Given that de Blob is using his entire body to paint these objects, you can bet it isn’t a ‘clean’ paint application.  Paint constantly streams behind de Blob, leaving a multi-colored trail behind him at all times, creating a glorious mess. 

The characters in the Color Resistance, and the Raydians themselves once freed, resemble a very smooth gummi-character.  That resemble a claymation figure like Gumby: exaggerated and over-animated.  The result is comedy without ever needing to utter a spoken word.  On the opposite end of the color spectrum, the Graydians and their Inky oppressors are more like Keystone Cops, bumbling around like penguins in oversized cop hats and batons.  Heavy Inkies look like they are carrying giant airbrush guns. The visual style and animation fits the tone of the game perfectly, and the Wii is able to handle the purposely understated world without dropping a single frame.  Even when the paint is flying and Raydians are cheering in the streets, the framerate remains completely locked, except in multiplayer.  On the numbers side of things, the game clips along at 16:9 and at 480p. 
There is a four player split-screen multiplayer game in de Blob that we’ll talk about later. 

Unfortunately, while the single player game runs perfectly and look relatively sharp, the multiplayer game shows jagged textures and a slightly lower framerate.  This doesn’t seem any better or worse with 2 players than with 4, but it is there just the same. 

My only complaint against the graphic design of de Blob is something that resolves itself – the first few levels.  As you play through the first few hours of the game you’ll really begin to get a severe déjà vous rash as many of the levels feel essentially the same, I think a little beyond what was intended.  As you get into the later levels, the areas open up a bit and you’ll get a bit more platforming options as the game goes more vertical, giving you access to higher ledges and the tops of taller buidings. 

As much as you might think that this game is all about the color and flash, it really and truly isn’t my favorite part of the game.  In de Blob, there is absolutely no music at the start of a level.  A little backbeat hangs out in the background, giving a little cadence to your purpose, but there is little else.  Donning paint from a nearby paintcan, you’ll not only paint objects in the environment, you’ll also paint the soundtrack!  Before you begin the level you’ll chose de Blob’s mood, which ultimately sets what the soundtrack will become when you’ve almost completed an area.  You’ll unlock new moods for de Blob as you progress through the levels.  Each new mood changes the soundtrack drastically, but that isn’t all.

It’d be somewhat easy to simply ‘reveal’ more of a pre-made soundtrack as the player paints the environment, but that isn’t how it works here.  As you sling paint you’ll get a base soundtrack, and if you paint everything in a single color, it’ll be fairly complete.  The second you grab a different color and start re-painting some of those objects, mixing the color palate of the landscape, you’ll gradually get a completely different soundtrack! Even if you don’t like every music track, there is no discounting how difficult it is to create a game that builds its soundtrack from scratch. 

The sound effects in de Blob are similarly quirky and fun.  Character voices are one part The Sims and one part Charlie Brown as each character talks in something that resembles “blah blah blah wah wah” with occasional recognizable words tossed in for good measure.  The sounds squeak, splash, splatter, and slosh exactly as you expect to hear if giant buckets of paint were being splashed around you. 

Obviously, with this being a mouse and keyboard title originally, the first thing that the design team had to do was properly leverage the control scheme of the Wii.  Controlling de Blob uses both the Wii Remote and the nunchuck.  de Blob has no legs, and as such tends to slide like the aforementioned Gumby through the landscape.  Holding down Z locks you on to a nearby target, be it a transform engine, enemy, or can of paint.  A quick downward swing will send de Blob careening into that object to pick it up or crush it as necessary.

Shortly after the first level you’ll start to traverse the landscape using Z-Jumps.  Z-Jumps are essentially little spots that you can roll de Blob, and using the swing of the Wii Remote, rocket towards another spot, similar to the bumpers in any Sonic the Hedgehog game.  These Z-Jumps become a major part of shortcutting the city, or completing some of the race challenges in the game. 

The camera attempts to stay behind de Blob, rotating behind him to remain forward.  You can nudge it back into place with a quick tap of the C button.  While you can adjust the speed of the camera swing in the options, it never really felt fast enough, so I ended up hitting the C button quite a bit during the game. 

Another button I used fairly extensively was the A button.  The A button gives you a relational compass that shows you where the nearest paint cans and their color, the nearest water source to rinse off, the nearest painting objective, and the nearest objective to your current mission.  It is pretty handy and helps make sure you are painting the right objects. 
In short, the only real problem with the control scheme is the camera / jump combo.  Because the jump relies on the Wii Remote accurately passing the gesture onto the console, it works most of the time, but not all of the time.  Force control schemes that work even most of the time are still frustrating some of the time.  Simply allowing me to remap the jump key to A or something similar would probably get the job done. 

If you can categorize a game like this in any way, it’d be something of an action puzzle title.  That said, there are very few games like de Blob.  In fact, Katamari Damacy and its sequels are really the only games that utilize a control scheme like this one.  de Blob starts off his level as a clear ball of fluid.  Rolling around the level, you’ll find copious amounts of paint cans in three colors that you can absorb into yourself.  Once you’ve picked up a color you’ll leave a very messy trail of that color as you glide along the streets.  Bumping up against, or splashing on top of, buildings will immediately paint it in that color.  It’s through this mechanic that the puzzle elements come in.

The objectives in the beginning are pretty simple – paint the block to advance to the next area.  As you work further into the city you’ll eventually encounter more Raydian citizens who will give you objectives.  Sometimes it’s as simple as taking out several iNKY soldiers, sometimes it is as difficult as painting an entire block a certain color within a 60 second time limit.   Since getting to the next area is based on the number of points in your bank, getting combinations (painting objects without stopping at any point) is the key to moving forward.  As the objectives change and require more varieties of colors, you’ll have to use the convenient puddles of water to wash yourself back to neutral.  Similarly, when you’ve only got red and yellow, but you need green, you’ll have to hit the red and then the yellow paint cans to mix yourself some green paint.  Obviously, this creates a bit of strategy in selecting the right color at the right time. 

Not all of the villainous iNKY soldiers are black and grey – the Elite iNKY soldiers are the shock troops of the iNKY army.  They are injected with a super serum that makes them completely impervious to all damage!  The drawback is that it dyes them a certain color to which they are particularly vulnerable.  Obviously, you’ll need to use de Blob’s ability to shift colors to select the appropriate ‘weapon’ against them. 

Even if you do enough painting to unlock the next area, you’ll have likely missed quite a few elements in the game.  At any point you can pause and look at your progress for the area.  It’ll tell you not only how much you’ve painted, but also how many trees, Radians, billboards, landmarks, challenges, styles, and complete transforms you’ve hit in the area.  The landmarks are the easiest to spot – they are usually some sort of Graydian propaganda-spewing tower or mind-control device looming large in the area.  Taking them out starts off pretty simple – dump 30 red paint blobs into it by locking on and shaking the Wii remote like a crazy blob, but towards the end you’ll likely have to drop in colors that require some mixing like brown, green, purple, or all three. 

de Blob isn’t just about painting the town – there are several race challenges that are entirely optional in the game.  Racing often completes many of your objectives as you are taken around the back side of buildings you’d have to paint later anyway, so it behooves you to run them.  You’ll also get extra time in which to accomplish the main objective (remember: points to unlock the next gate), with bonuses for freeing Radians and using multiple colors to do it.  The great part about the challenges is that they are fairly well laid out and progressive.  As you complete minor objectives you’ll eventually be tasked with taking out a major target like an iNKY propaganda tower or police station.  If you happen to fail the objective, not to fret – you can simply retry the objective and all progress you’ve made to that point is saved.  This means if you bust your paint-covered tail to paint a whole block but fail out at the last object, you simply have to get the right color on that object to finish it up.  It keeps the pace of the game moving and reduces the inevitable stress of timed objectives.  Similarly, if you accomplish other objectives (painting a whole block, hitting all the billboards, etc.) you’ll also see extra time drops that extend the countdown on your current objective as well. 

de Blob gets slightly larger as he absorbs paint.  When he runs down to zero, you lose one from your health.  Throughout all of the levels you’ll find health icons that you can collect to increase this number, so it is not a traditional ‘health bar’ like you might expect.  The paint acts as ammunition and armor for de Blob.  This becomes more of a factor when you take on larger opponents.  The heavy iNKy soldiers take 10 paint blobs to take out, but if you encounter even one after expending 90 out of your 100 paint, they can knock you out rather quickly.  Obviously this only gets harder when you start talking about the fast moving iNKY Jet Bike, the resilient iNKY Turrets, and the hard-hitting iNKY Tank which requires a full 100 blobs of paint to take down! 

The gameplay in de Blob sounds very much like the beginning of any level – flat and grey; it is in fact quite the opposite.  While the gameplay elements may be simple, it is also addictive.  At its core, most of the missions are as simple as painting buildings, but as you get further into the game, your objectives will require you to dodge over hot plates, jump large gaps, dodge incoming iNKY Tank fire, and paint buildings in several different colors.  Racing levels break up the monotony, and there is always something to do within Chroma.  Based on how many objectives you’ve completed, how much time you have left, and how many points you’ve amassed, you’ll also be given a medal score from Bronze to Gold.  These medals also unlock other secret missions that allow you to re-run an area, but with different objectives.  I just wish there was a bit more variety in the mission types.

As a purely single player game, de Blob is a decent platformer fused with a fairly unique concept.  With plenty to collect and do, the only hitch here is that so much of it is the same.  The early levels are the worst offenders on this, with later levels mixing it up a bit more.

On the multiplayer side of things, you can play up to four players in a split-screen environment.  The modes pit players against each other in 9 levels that unlock through the single player game.  Here is a quick run-down:

- Paint Match reminds me of HORSE from the Tony Hawk games as players simply try to paint as many objects and buildings as they can in a three minute time span. 
- Blob Race is similar to Paint Match, but each building can only be painted once, and not everything can be painted. 
- Blob on the Run is a combination of Paint Match and tag.  The first player to grab paint can paint, and the other players try to chase him down.  Pouncing on their head steals the paint, and makes you ‘it’. 

All of the matches run for three minutes and are essentially games of tag or HORSE, but with slight modification.  During our playtime we found that Blob on the Run was the best of the three game types.  While it isn’t as compelling as true online play, it is a multiplayer choice that fits the gameplay nicely.

Each level in de Blob can be beaten in roughly 40 minutes if you put on blinders and complete only enough objectives to reach the final areas.  Those same levels can easily consume double that amount of time or more if you plan to actually unlock everything in the area.  Spending time on objectives, landscape painting, and changing landmarks is the key to unlocking the hidden levels, artwork, and behind-the-scenes items of the game.  All told, there is roughly a dozen hours of unique gameplay here, weakened only by an occasionally fussy camera and the semi-unresponsive Wii Remote gesture system.  If you spend the time on your first run through of the game to find almost everything, it reduces the replay value of the game greatly, but the first run is still a very unique and entertaining experience.

More in this time of year than any other, there is a glut of ‘me too’ titles in the channel.  Shooters, racers, RPGs, MMOs, and others rush to vie for your holiday dollars.  How surprised am I that I am going to recommend something that doesn’t have the word ‘rock’ ‘gear’ ‘tales’ or ‘resist’ in the title instead.  de Blob is a unique title in a sea of sameness.  One part Katamari Damacy, two parts of the humor in Rayman Raving Rabbids, de Blob takes everything both of those titles did right and adds it to a unique and entertaining story and gameplay mechanic.  While the camera and occasional Wii Remote sensitivity issues rear their ugly head, the gameplay makes it worth the effort.

Gaming Trend Score

85

1. Graphics: 95
2. Audio: 95
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 80
5. Value/Replay: 80
6. OVERALL:85