The spirit of Rainbow Brite lives on. http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/impressionsArt.cfm?artid=16464 de Blob is a clever little game about painting a world whose color has been stripped away by an evil, fascist government. As the rebellion's hero, you must roll around and apply various colors to the streets and buildings, restoring life and music to the world. It's a fun, subversive premise told through very amusing cut-scenes.
The gameplay is a bit like Katamari Damacy or the spray-heavy levels from Super Mario Sunshine (in reverse). Each of the ten levels has plenty of real estate to colorize, and some monochrome enemies will be around to get in your way. If they hit you with their gray sludge, you have just a few seconds to jump into a pool of water before the blandness becomes fatal. There are various cans of paint lying around, so you can usually choose what color to apply, and each one has a different effect on the transformed objects and elicits a different style of music from the dynamic soundtrack. Objects are painted all at once, so you just need to touch a building once for it to be painted thoroughly.
The controls are a bit surprising. de Blob feels like he's on roller skates, as he moves with a lot of momentum and has a pretty large turn radius. This makes it hard to line up perfectly with an object or enemy, so there's a targeting system. Targeting is actually mandatory for combat; you lock on with Z and shake the Wii Remote to pounce down upon the enemy. It feels loose and automatic, like Sonic the Hedgehog's homing attack, but combat is a fairly minor part of the game.
Not all objects and buildings can be painted by touch. Some "landmarks" can only be painted after completing a mission objective, like turning a whole square red or defeating a set of enemies. You may even have to climb up to the top of a tall building with a series of wall jumps. The developers claim that the game can get quite challenging in the later levels, but it wasn't clear from the E3 demo how the gameplay ramps up as you progress through the game.
de Blob is a cool idea, and I like its originality and sense of style, but I'm still not sure whether the simple gameplay can hold up for more than a couple of levels. It's coming out soon, so we won't have to wait long to find out.
Topic: IMPRESSIONS: de Blob (Read 4216 times)
