Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

De Blob is a very surprising game, much more enjoyable than the 'kidified' box art would lead you to think and much lengthier than I thought it would be, I really enjoyed this charming title, despite a few technical issues.

You play De Blob, the hero of the colour underground, a resistance movement fighting against the evil I.N.K.T corporation who have occupied Chroma City and turned all the inhabitants into boring, dull Graydians and removed all the colour from the world. Your job is to re-paint the city and liberate the Graydians back into Raydians, stopping I.N.K.T in the process.

The gameplay is surprisingly addictive, and has you roll into roaming 'paint bots' which contain the three primary colours of blue, yellow and red. This soaks De Blob in the colour specificed giving you 'paint points' up to a total of one hundred and they can also be combined to form other colours, such as yellow and blue make green and so on. Rolling into a building paints it your current colour and reduces your paint points by one.

The gray and dull world is slowly turned into a vibrant and colourful place, and it becomes addictive rolling around and hitting every white and gray builiding, wall and object in sight to fill it with colour, but there are specific challenges to complete, ranging from paints certain buildings a certain colour or transforming a I.N.K.T building by hitting it with a certain number of paint points of a certain colour, or even destroying a certain number of I.N.K.T troops. All these are done under a time limit imposed at the start of the challenge, but there is also an overall timer that counts down while you roam around the world. Completing challenges gives extra time to the main counter giving you more time to paint the area of the city you are in.

As I have said De Blob is very addictive when rolling around Chroma City, as every thing that isnt a vibrant colour you want to paint. This leads into to the challenges, which also lead to a set of objectives shown at the end of each level, such as painting every tree, completing every challenge or painting 75% or more of the area. I couldnt help but feel however that these challenges would have worked better had they been xbox live or psn achievements/trophies, as I had no incentive whatsoever to replay a level to complete them.

One niggling problem, though by far not the biggest of the games issues, is that it isnt possible to save during a level, only at the end of each one. Now if the levels were shorter this wouldnt be so much of a problem, however each level can take upwards of an hour to complete and if your about half way through means that turning off the game will loose all your progress, which can be disheartening if you have completed several challenges. Saving at each new section of the level that opens up would have been much better.

The biggest problem with De Blob, however, isnt whether or not it should be on the more powerful consoles, but rather a problem inherit with the console it is on, and that is of control. Actually moving about is easy to do and is controled by the analogue stick on the nunchuck, however jumping is the biggest problem, as I had several issues where the game didnt recognise my flick of the remote to jump.

This is compounded by De Blob's natural, well blobiness, which while it allows him to perform a strange kind of wall run, if you jump in a narrow area he has a tendancy to stick to the wall, and can prevent you from jumping at all. In fairness I only encountered this a couple of times, but it was still enough to spoil those sections and make me fail challenges.

The camera does a half decent job, and rarely gets stuck behind geometry but it is easy to forget that the camera controls are mapped to the d-pad of the Wii remote and roll around without even using them, making the challenges more difficult than they need to be. This is another thing that leads me to believe a re-realise on xbox and ps3 could do this game alot more justice.

De Blob is an addictive, vibrant platformer that oozes charm and paints your time with it a happy and satisfying colour. With a few control tweaks and possibly a platform change, this could become a great title, but as such, it is still one of the best games on the Wii and really does encompass the systems simple and pick up and play nature, I recommend this to anyone wanting to be cheered up.