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de Blob

by Steven Rodriguez - July 15, 2007, 10:24 pm EDT
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I, for one, welcome our new Ink Corp. masters.

One of the games I was interested in playing at E3 was de Blob from THQ. The concept sounded interesting, and playing the game a little confirmed that. Although what I played at the show was a bit on the shallow side, I do like the direction the company is taking with the game.

The story of the game is that de Blob is put into a world where the police force of the world wants things to be black and white, sucking the color out of everything. Playing as the titular character, you need to go about restoring color to the world. de Blob does this by first coming in contact with color capsules that will change his color and make him grow in size. After that, it's as simple as touching a building, tree, citizen or other object to make it colorful. Movement is done with the analog stick and jumping is done with a Wii remote flick. That's pretty much all there is to moving de Blob around.

One of the first things that was immediately apparent to me when playing the game was the very plain black and white city. It looked really good for something so barren. There was a subtle softness to the scenery that screenshots do a good job of showing. Seeing it in motion, however, is very impressive, especially once you can see a lot of buildings in the background of the large level in the demo. As you spruce the place up with color it starts looking happy. The music will also begin to change as you do this, as each time you slap a building with paint the soundtrack becomes more vibrant. Each of the six colors emits its own unique sound, so you can make the sound of the city anything you want it to be. That's pretty cool.

The primary goal of a level is to reach a target score within a time limit. Points are made from colorizing buildings, and you can make combos to increase your score multiplier by jumping from building to building without hitting the ground. Levels also have challenges that can be activated by talking to characters in the level, which will require you to paint certain buildings certain colors or perform jumping tests of skill that will give you more points. In the demo level, I found a few corridors where I could perform nine consecutive jumps, which was a pretty good addition to my points total. I can imagine that later levels in the game might have more complex building patterns that will challenge your jumping skills.

de Blob won't have a free ride to just streak around the city, however. Black figures from the evil Ink Corp. will be out on patrol and looking to blacken the hero. If this happens, you'll need to head for a water source to purge the stuff before you shrink in size and die. To prevent that from happening you'll want to lock-on to an enemy target, jump into the air, and flick the Wii remote downwards to slam down and blot out the baddie. Combat wasn't emphasized very much during the demo, but it was an early level. Perhaps in later levels we'll see more enemies to deal with while painting the town.

I was impressed with how good the game looked and at how THQ is willing to take a novel concept and make a game out of it. Just by playing the demo level, which was one of the earlier areas in the game, I wonder if de Blob will be a deep enough experience to hold the attention of people long enough to go from level to level. On the other hand, there will be at least a dozen levels in the final game, and I imagine each one will be a little more complex than the first. Regardless, I'm glad to see the Wii getting a game like this. It'll add a splash of color to the system's library, and you can't say anything bad about that.

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Genre Action
Developer Blue Tongue Entertainment

Worldwide Releases

na: de Blob
Release Sep 22, 2008
PublisherTHQ
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