Thanks to its intelligent game play and excellent physical effects, Boom Blox can satisfy a wide variety of players.

User Rating: 9 | Boom Blox WII
The name Steven Spielberg has been associated with famous movies like Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds or series Indiana Jones... Hence, it was public opinion to expect an imposing Action-Adventure after the director revealed that he was cooperating with EA in a video game. However it turned out to be totally different. Boom Blox (BB), the game with fanciful name, is a pure puzzle-solving and supposedly suitable for everybody.

Game play of BB is based on cubes and rectangular parallelepiped of different sizes. In play scenes, these blocks are arranges in various orders and architectures to achieve several goals like destroying a structure or pulling out a block without affecting others. In order to do so, players are provided with many destructive tools: the baseballs, tennis balls or bowling balls as bullets, the hand tool to hold objects and even bombs and laser guns. Manipulation in game play is simple, mostly exploit sensor of Wii Remote. For example, to throw a ball you just need to choose your target by moving the bull's eye, hold A button then swing your arm to carry out the movement. The only other manipulation you need to remember is holding B button to rotate the camera until you get the right view. That's all about the control, easy, simple.

Though most of the blocks are cubes and rectangular parallelepipeds but they possess many distinct attributes that result in different interaction. Take the yellow cubes, you will gain points when dropping them onto the ground, but the same movement with gray ones will decrease your score; the purple blocks will disappear when being touched; more dangerous are red ones, they are bombs that will explode on collision; similarly the green cubes containing explosive substances but only activate when placed besides another green cube... However, the above are only basic, insentient figures. we will later meet others which resemble lovely animals. For example, the courageous Gorilda mother fighting to rescue her babies from Tiki autochthon, the hen McCluck running around and lay ... bombs, the Reaper Gurgles Grimm and his skeleton companion Skully McGill who are specialized in ... destroying other characters, and their only enemy is the dog Buster Maguff. There are about 30 such characters, all are funny and contribute a great deal to the success of this game.

Besides exultant game play, physical effects and the ability to calculate the strength and angle of player's throws also play an important role in BB. Basing its puzzles on physical interaction, the game's success depends greatly on physical engine. That's why the famous Havok is chosen. In fact, the engine play a critical role in producing many interesting scenes: withdrawing a plank can collapse a tower above; a bomb exploding in the space will cause tens of small blocks flying in all directions; or you can try throwing a bowling ball into a tunnel and watching it rebound insides... The reason physical interaction is so persuasive is that one movement will always cause "domino" effect, meaning bringing about many other ones sequentially. It's not exaggerating to say that these effects are on the same level with Spielberg movies.

As for the capability of the game to calculate exactly the force and angle of your throw, it's not hard to find out the evident. Depending on how hard you swing your hand, the balls or bombs will have different orbits: a slight throw causes them fly up a bit before dropping slowly; a strong one makes them fly straight ahead like a bullet. Moreover, the camera can be rotated freely, so try to adjust the angle just a little bit will result in a totally different trajectory and interaction. As a result of the combination between physical effect and precise calculation, one situation can be solved in various ways. That's how the game stimulate our ability to measure, predict and explore new solutions. In many scenes, it's not hard to achieve the goal, but trying to break your own record will become more and more challenging, but still possible over time: complete mission with two throw while the criterion for gold medal is three, for example. The game is highly appreciated in its replay value.

Like many other puzzle games, BB contains a great number of play scenes, up to hundreds. They form two main groups: Explore and Adventure. Explore mode includes singular and simple objectives. You only encounter basic blocks of several colors and exploit their attributes to complete the mission. Adventure mode are more comprehensive with stories in fairy-tale style. One of them is about the Sheep kingdom, where you have to protect your block against the attack of wild beasts, but finally lose them to the monkeys! Or you may want to travel with the cowboy Boots in his gold-rush adventure towards the West. Another is about the Gorilda mother as told above. The basic game play in Adventure is not much different but the participation of lively characters make them much more absorbing and dramatic. In addition, every story has cartoon cut scenes and poetic narratives, which make us feel like Alice in the Wonderland. Once you have completed both modes, there are other difficulty level to try. Moreover, you can join your friends in Party games with either Competitive or Cooperative modes. In the end, you can create your own adventure, characters, blocks with the toolset provided along with the game. It's a chance for our creative mind to show quality, and who knows if someone may even make more interesting adventures than those of EA and Steven Spielberg!

Of course BB has some drawbacks, which I really do not want to go into. Control with Wii Remote sometimes proves to be too sensitive and makes difficulty when our hands tremble. Processing power of Wii show limitation in big explosion with many blocks when the frame rate drops considerably. For the same reason, you can place too many objects in the scene you create yourself with toolset. However, they are minor besides the success of other aspects.

Video games do not have a very good a very good reputation for educational objectives. However, this is an exception. BB is not only suitable for dedicated gamers, but also for parents who want something different from Lego for their children in this summer.