Boom Blox

The presentation of Boom Blox is sure to be a sticking point for some ‘serious’ gamers who might think the cartoon animals and sickeningly-sweet stories in Adventure mode are a real turn-off. They’ll take one look at the game art and insist that this is a game for children only.

Those people are fools – the art style of Boom Blox is an inspired and useful gameplay tool. Not only does the cubist design and cartoon textures mean the game still manages to look great on the under-powered Wii, but the design also means that the levels can be quickly and easily judged. The bright colours help you instantly size up a level and pin point all the possible ways to finish it.

Often too there are numerous ways to finish a level and searching to find new ways to do it is one of the main draws of the game. One idea we toyed with whilst playing was creating our own HORSE style gamemode where the same level must be completed in different ways – first using exactly 10 throws of a ball or bomb, then using 9, 8, 7, and so on.


For any other game trying to create your own ideas for a gamemode could be problematic. The game might be too complex or the levels non-repeatable, but this is just another strength of Boom Blox. The levels can be loaded in less than a second and the controls are so easy to pick up it’s unreal – just a case of holding A and swinging, rotating the view by holding B.

In fact, the controls are so easy to grasp that even a child could do it; something that's a core idea behind Boom Blox. This is a game that can definitely be played as a family, but easily as a singleplayer game too. The easy to learn, difficult to master idea behind the controls and the levels means that Boom Blox is something you can keep coming back to.

Conclusions

With all that said though, there are a few weak points in Boom Blox which perhaps limit how much fun you can have with it. The first and most damaging flaw is the length of the game because after only a few hours of gaming we’d already finished nearly the entire Explore mode and were making a decent dent in the Adventure side of things.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, like all puzzle games, Boom Blox will frustrate you as much as it’ll keep you entertained. Playing through the Chemical Blox campaign in Explore mode was something we did with ease until about the eighth level, at which point we got stumped for more than an hour. Lots of swear words were uttered before we eventually got a gold medal.

Still, it’s all very much a minor chink in the armour of Boom Blox and this is definitely one of the must-have family games in our opinion. As a party game it may play second fiddle to the likes of Warioware, but if you’re after something to play on a week night when you don’t need a bottle of tequila to have fun then this is definitely the game for you. The combination of fluid controls, screaming chickens and huge explosions is a sure winner.