Boom Blox Review (WII)

Spielberg’s latest masterpeice?

When I was asked if I wanted to review the latest offering from Steven Spielberg and EA I was intrigued – what would a team like that have come up with? What sort of epic story would I be a part of? I was even more intrigued when Boom Blox dropped through the letterbox. What part could Spielberg possibly have had in the making of this game? As it turns out, his involvement was because he wanted to help create a game he could play with his kids, and the storyline (such as it is) is very reminiscent of Dr. Seuss.

It’s impossible to describe Boom Blox without mentioning Jenga as there are a large number of levels that require you to pluck blocks from teetering towers, but there is also so much more. In fact a huge number of the puzzles are more destruction themed rather than trying to keep the tower upright, and there are hundreds of puzzles to solve using baseballs, bombs, bouncy balls, lasers and regular bricks just to name a few.

There are 3 main modes to play in Boom Blox: Play, Party, and Create (aka single player, multi-player, and create-your-own) with different sub-categories within them. In single player you can choose between challenge or adventure modes, with adventure mode being the only “story” driven part of the game, although to be honest the stories are more a weak excuse to link together some puzzles of the same type, such as the kittens trying to get through a haunted forest, or a gorilla trying to rescue her kids. Party mode lets you play cooperatively or competitively with a friend, and Create mode lets you try your hand at building your own puzzles.

Each puzzle will present you with some sort of structure of bricks, gems, bombs etc, and an objective. You will then be given a medal according to how well you solved the puzzle, with more medals giving you more content to use in the Create game mode. Due to the nature of the game there is more than one way to solve most puzzles, but to achieve a gold medal you will have to think about how you solve them. For the Jenga style puzzles you will have to pull out the highest number of bricks without the structure falling. Some puzzles will require you to topple a structure in the fewest number of throws of a ball, with the gold medal being awarded if you can find the weakest spot and bring it down in one throw. There are also some “quick draw” light gun style games where you have to shoot zombies, and one of my favourites (apart from the obvious Jenga-like puzzles) is gold mining, where you must first blow strategic holes in a “mine” then lob bouncy balls in to convert bricks into gold. There are also “special” bricks in many of the levels such as vanishing blocks that simply disappear when hit, bomb blocks that explode on impact, or chemical blocks that will explode when they come into contact with another chemical block. All in all Boom Blox is probably the game that makes best use of the Wii’s hardware to date.

Party mode is great fun, with up to four players able to play with or against each other. The best way to introduce yourself to party mode is to use the quick selection which gives you a few random games to play from the many available. I wasn’t to keen on the “shooting” and “hose” style games in this though, as it seemed completely random as to how points were awarded, and generally the games seemed pointless. The Jenga style games though are fantastic and make this a brilliant game to play with a few mates and a few beers.

What really makes Boom Blox work is the physics used in the game. Light bricks might be easy to dislodge, but heavy ones will require you to throw with more force to move them. If you’re throwing a baseball it will go pretty much where you aim, but if you’re throwing a much heavier bowling ball it will curve through the air, forcing you to aim higher or throw harder to hit your mark.

All in all Boom Blox is probably the game that makes best use of the Wii’s hardware to date.

And of course in the Jenga-type puzzles the tower will sway and jiggle as you remove blocks, or slowly topple over with pieces breaking away as it falls if you knock the wrong block out of place. The only problem I found with the physics is that when playing the Jenga games, the bricks you remove seem far too “floaty” and I’ve often flung them away to one side quickly as I was under time constraints, only to find them come bouncing/floating back into the tower from off-screen. Once you get used to this floatiness though it is fairly easy to control your actions and let the blocks go gently so this doesn’t happen.

Graphically Boom Blox is very cartoonish and colourful to the extreme. It’s nothing special but is fairly pleasing and with the brilliant gameplay you certainly won’t have anything to complain about. The music is not too bad either, although it is incredibly repetitive and quite catchy – a great combination to have you wandering about whistling or humming it after you’ve finished playing.

So are there any negatives? To be honest, not many… My main gripe is the way levels are unlocked sequentially – I’m currently completely stuck on a level and I can’t play any other levels except ones I’ve already completed until I manage to pass the one I’m stuck on. I Understand you can’t just have all the levels available straight away, but it would be nice to have maybe a tier system where unlocking certain levels unlocks a range of new levels, so I could go and try my hand at them and come back fresh to the one I’m stuck on. My only other complaint is that my throws very often don’t seem to get registered very well, so my arm-wrenching throw gets converted into a pitiful flop that falls well short of the mark. I also found that sometimes when throwing, if I let go of the button at a certain point (while the cursor would be off screen perhaps?) the throw would not register at all. I also found when playing in multi-player that the controls kept getting switched back to a single controller after playing a match, even though we’d set it to use 2 controllers which was rather frustrating. Finally, there is some noticeable slowdown during big explosion sequences.

The only other potential negative (related to the whole level unlocking thing I already mentioned) is that I feel some of the set targets are a bit hard for younger children. As I already said I’m completely stuck on one challenge at the moment as I can’t even make the bronze medal objective (although granted this is on an expert level challenge). Having said that, if you’re playing it as a family game with young kids then you’ll probably be around to help them out.

In conclusion – if you have a Wii then this game should really be in your collection. There’s hours of head-scratching fun to be had figuring out the most efficient way to complete a level, and there’s a fair amount of replay value if you didn’t get the gold medal first time.

Silver Y Award

4 / 5