Topic: Blocky Bot (Wii U) Review

[Daan]

It is certainly blocking something and that thing is called fun.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/40779/blocky-bot-wii-u-review

Mobot Studios are one of the fresh new faces on the Wii U eShop. Their first game, Paper Monsters Recut, was a fun and enjoyable game with various cool platforming challenges. Considering their last game was so good, I couldn't wait to pick up Blocky Bot and play it through on my Wii U. Sadly, my hope suddenly turned into sadness after a couple rounds of playing. Blocky Bot performs as it should, but nothing of it is exactly fun to play.

Blocky Bot is best described as an arcade game. In this title, you will hop from platform to platform and go as high as you possibly can. Along the way, you will have to avoid enemies and collect coins to purchase additional characters. That is everything this game has on offer and every round feels incredibly similar. There is one type of enemy you will encounter, which endlessly moves back and forth. Next to that, every round moves along quite quickly, as you are asked to simply keep moving. If you just decide to stand there, you will die due to rising lava and this doesn't make it exactly forgiving.

For an arcade experience like this, you would expect the ability to share your scores. While you do see the best score on the main menu, there are no offline or online leaderboards to be found here. Blocky Bot does nothing to encourage you to keep playing besides offering more coins and those are a hassle too. It takes 100 of them to unlock a character and you can't even choose which one to unlock. The game just picks one at random for you and calls it a day, which feels like a slap to the face.

The game runs and plays quite solid. The controls are really well put together, which makes going through the game a breeze. As far as the presentation is concerned, it is the true highlight of the entire game. With four various themes and addictive tunes, it is clear to see where the effort went. That is truly an absolute shame as it is clear the developers have taken their time.

Blocky Bot wants to be a fun arcade style game, but it fails to deliver on that. After a few rounds, you feel done with the game and this can't be what the developers wanted. You can see that the presentation is lovely and that they cared about what they were doing. However, the game fails because it didn't want to push me to do my best. This could have been easily accomplished by adding leaderboards or making the unlockables happen faster. As it stands, Blocky Bot can best be avoided.