Introduction
A world of wonderful colour (with a u) is enslaved by some evil grey bastards. Restore excitement to the place in the guise of a rolling, bouncing blob of paint.
De Blob was originally developed by students in the Netherlands and picked up by Oz developers Blue Tongue.
The original game is free and available here for PC.
Gameplay
De Blob is a third-person adventure platformer. Your health is also your ammunition- Paint. Paint is found in the little robots that have been sucking the cities dry of colour and is available in Red, Yellow and Blue varieties which affords you an extra palette of Orange, Purple, Green and Brown. Enemies are defeated by bouncing on them, but doing so costs you a certain amount of paint.
There are 10 areas to work through, made up of a small number of enclosures, unlocked at a certain score. While the levels are on a timer (Gaming Sin #435), this is really only an issue if you want to go for a 100% clearance.
The missions come in four flavours- you'll have to paint stuff, get to somewhere, defeat enemies and/or restore some government building to its former glory. Completing the missions will get you points and a few minutes more for your level timer. I rarely had less than fifteen minutes remaining on the clock, despite the levels lasting anywhere between 30 minutes and over an hour.
There's extra missions to unlock that follow different rules to the main game. These in turn unlock art and movies in the abundant Extras menu.
Once you finish a level you can go back and paint to your heart's content without a timer.
There are multiplayer games too, but since I haven't got a second nunchuck I can't even get in to the menu to look around.
Sights and Sounds
De Blob is one of the best-presented games I've seen. The menus are slick, the music fits perfectly and the visuals are consistent throughout. As the environment becomes less grey, the music too becomes more featured. Each colour is associated with an instrument that plays its part in the tune as you paint. It's a great effect.
The style has been judged well too- ported to a more powerful machine the game would likely look just the same bar perhaps higher-resolution textures. The cities are huge, but the frame-rate never suffers. The loading screen occupies your attention with details on the plot and your goal.
The animated cutscenes are a joy to behold. The comic timing is spot on.
It's a very well put-together package.
Stuff that sucks
Alas, the jump control let the game down a bit. A sharp flick of the Wiimote is used to jump- you'll do a lot of this- and it just isn't as accurate or responsive as a button. De Blob isn't hard, but it's more difficult than it really should be thanks to this mechanic.
Conclusion
There's not much variation, but it's fun throughout. The usual advice applies- rent it to see if it's your cup of tea. But do rent it, because it's certainly worth a play through.
Score :
Metacritic: 82
Trailer:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74DcjBxv9Rw[/media]
