De Blob (Wii)

De Blob
THQ / Blue Tongue

Reviewed by Anthony

Finally, a game that combines my rabid love of graffiti with my rabid love of blobs! Dark secrets aside, THQ’s managed to bring us one of the few highly successful Wii games out there that aren’t developed by Nintendo. Not only that, they made a cool game with personality, and a charming cast of characters put into a good enough game that they could seriously build a series on it. Good for them, good for Wii owners.

De Blob is a charming little game that has you controlling a blob character (called “blob”, oddly enough) as he picks up paint of various colors, brings color to towns and smashes evil “Inkies” that strive to keep everything white, black and gray. It qualifies as sort of action/platformer, but is a fairly relaxing playthrough in practice; it boasts some impressively large levels, a pretty awesome soundtrack, and decent gameplay for its running time. A lack of variety in the gameplay and a very low difficulty keep it from being amazing overall.

What’s good:
- The level size is very impressive. A single initial load will bring up an entire level full of buildings, enemies, trees, branching areas... and it all keeps track of every single thing that’s been painted and what styles they’ve been painted. This has to be a technical achievement of some sort, because it maintains its framerate and records everything done on the stage even after hundreds of buildings are painted in different colors. It’s nice to be able to play for an hour+ without a single load.
- As you might expect from a game based on painting, the world becomes gradually very vibrant and colorful. Sure, everything starts gray or withered, but as you restore sections of the world, turn landmarks into playhouses, and paint buildings, blimps, trees, billboards, and captured citizens, soon you’ve got an impressively vibrant world staring at you. What starts out bland and uninspired will look like something out of LocoRoco by time you’re done, and it’s pretty cool to see that in action.
- What surprised me the most and what’s easily the game’s most impressive feature is the soundtrack. The boys at THQ went all out here, and got a full band to play out the soundtrack to each level. Wow. Depending on Blob’s selectable “mood”, you’ll have some background music helping you along.. might be tropical sounding, might be jazzy, might sound like something from Toejam & Earl or Umjammer Lammy... but on top of that, they add various instrumental sounds and riffs for each time something’s painted. Further, they even change up the sound effects depending on the paint color being used. It’s catchy, sets a cool mood, and has a surprisingly big effect on fleshing out the experience.
- Although there are bits of action at times and some precarious platforming, overall the game is relaxing in a way, while being well balanced for multiple play styles. A younger, inexperienced player could easily just go around painting stuff until the level’s clear, where a more engrossed player can seek out the various challenges and explore all the levels looking to paint everything, find every item, unlock bonus challenges and try the time trial aspect. They even added a “free paint” mode which allows you to just explore and paint things without any restrictions if you so please. You can get what you want out of the game, and that should keep the game fun for just about anyone interested.
- Challenge types are marked by different colors. While you only have four basic types of challenges, they have specific purposes, and to that extent, a savvy player can selectively choose which types to take on at more advantageous times. Nice little feature.
- The cutscenes with the “INKT Corporation” are adorable.

What’s neutral:
- Because the levels are so big and riddled with challenges, the fact that one can’t save progress anywhere during a level may be a little troublesome for someone looking to quickly pick the game up for a bit. You can easily spend over an hour on a single level, and should something go terribly awry, that’s a lot of progress to lose. Sure, you can exit once a milestone is reached, but if you need to stop playing and you’ve found 13/14 paint styles, you’ll have to collect it all over again if you quit or beat the level.
- The game is just a wee bit too much on the easy side. You can restart challenges whenever if you fail them, but in general, I probably completed 95%+ on my first try. When special challenges are unlocked for getting Gold Medals on a normal stage, they offer some more specific and difficult challenges... but even the very last ones in the game I was able to complete within one or two attempts. I don’t mind having to work to earn some victories; very few aspects of the game provided any significant difficulty to complete.
- I wish developers would realize that just because it’s the Wii, you don’t have to add in unnecessary motion control. In this case, every jump/attack in the game is performed with a swing of the remote. That’s fine and all, but after a long time, it can get a little repetitive. Plus, though they made it such that you can’t seem to get stuck completely, sometimes you’ll be stuck mashed into some objects on the screen, and jumping out would be a lot easier if you could just rapidly hit a button rather than keep waving your arm like a madman.
- Despite being of different sizes and having a few different things to paint, the levels have very little different between them; all challenges have the same basic goals regardless of level, every world has a bunch of buildings to paint, and every level just has different quantities of the same items to find and landmarks to paint. There isn’t even a boss until the very end! The challenges outside the main game are a decent break, but they’re very short and often still low on difficulty.
- A two-to-four player competitive mode was added. But even for two players, the framerate suffers very badly. The games are decent, but fairly similar to each other and unlikely to provide much entertainment. The person who owns the game will have a definite home-court advantage, and finding four competent De Blob players who love the multiplayer mode is pretty unlikely.
- The fully controllable camera is a nice touch, but it could’ve used a Zoom function rather than the “look in first person” mode to help make jumps and look for items when the camera spins to an odd angle.

What’s bad:
- The Z-targeting system is dreadful at times. While the game promises that you can hold Z to lock onto things, then tap Z to change targets, what it doesn’t tell you is that it will sometimes arbitrarily switch targets once you’re holding it, and will sometimes make bizarrely boneheaded choices of which objects to target. Sometimes the target jumps to an object/enemy very far away when you’re on a time limit to hit something right next to you. That was pretty frustrating as it led to a few unnecessarily failed challenges, but was especially so when I accidentally exited a level because it targeted the exit pool that was much further away than a nearby enemy. I kind of wanted to finish that level, but you know!
- I was about to think this game did a great job of preventing glitches, since I was almost always able to wiggle my way out of areas I got seemingly stuck in. Then in the final world, when targeting some enemies, instead of attacking, Blob was suddenly cast up in the air with an impossibly high jump that put me in the final boss area. But I wasn’t supposed to be there yet, so naturally, the boss didn’t load. I’d missed much of the stage due to that, so I went back out of the area. When I left, it -then- loaded the final boss, and when I went to explore down the stage, huge portions of the stage were completely missing, and it ended up thrusting me into an area with no exit. I was in a floating box with instant-death pits on three sides and an impossible-to-scale wall on the other. When I died, it only restarted me in the glitched box of death. I had to restart the level completely. Ouch.

A horrendous glitch and some targeting issues aside, this was an enjoyable game from start to finish, even with the overall lack of variety and difficulty. This silly concept really took on a life of its own, as it’s hard not to be charmed by a bunch of little creatures dancing in the streets because you rescued them by painting their building and removing their gray, color-devouring suits. De Blob made for a charming, oddly relaxing game that I’m sure I’ll be looking at in the future if a sequel comes around. They won me over, so now it’s just a matter if they can turn a really good game into a fantastic game.