de Blob Review

I hate to say it, but the Wii has proven to be a garbage dump for third party software. Even as the market leading system, Nintendo has been unable to convince third parties to release anything but shovelware. THQ has been just as guilty of this as any, perhaps even more so. Since launching in 2006, the Wii has seen numerous ports of PS2 (yes, Sony’s last-gen system) games, many of which severely lack in quality. There is still hope. THQ announced many months ago that they would be releasing a new and totally unique franchise. de Blob is the final product.

The idea behind de Blob is quite simple. You play as a transparent blob that, when it smashes into a Paintbot, gives it color. You see, you live in a mundane city that is devoid of color (by law). As part of the Color Underground, your job is to restore life to the city by coloring buildings, signs and important structures. The INKT Corporation, a sort of enforcer of all things bland, don’t like this one bit and will come after you as you attempt to beautify Chroma City with your art. The premise reminds me a lot of Jet Set Radio.

Scattered throughout the ten vast worlds for you to explore are literally dozens of missions that you can complete. Of course what you do and in what order is totally up to you, but each world is broken up into three different zones. You will start off needing to fill your color meter to a certain point value before you can continue to the next area of the world. These missions are range from incredibly simple (one star difficulty) to challenging (three star difficulty), but nothing is exceedingly hard. Most of the time you will be asked to paint a block a certain color or race from one part of the city to the next via relay dots.

Controlling your blob is effortless, although there are times when I have managed to get stuck on a wall or something like that. The surprising thing for me is that the Wii Remote really does not come into play that much as you play the game. There are a few instances where they use it, such as gesturing downward to attack enemies, while gesturing up will have your blob jump. The analog stick controls the movement of the blob and the control pad controls the camera angles. You can have your little blob roll on the side of a building to avoid such hazards as ink and hot plates. If you find yourself in ink, you will have to roll your blob to the nearest water fountain to clean off.

By the way, your blob grows as you collect more Paintbots. You have a bar that tells you how many paint points you have. Each time you collect a Paintbot you add ten paint points to your tally. Paint points are used to paint buildings (one paint point), attack enemies (varies depending on type) and to take over important structures controlled by INKT. The Paintbots all are primary colors (yellow, blue and red), but they can be mixed to form secondary colors (purple, orange, green), as well as a brown. A lot of the missions will have you mix colors to paint buildings different stripes.

If you are looking for a high quality third party title on Wii, de Blob is the game you should be looking at. There is plenty of style and fun for people of all ages to enjoy. It really reminds me of something you would find on the Dreamcast. Ironically, there’s nothing special about de Blob that could have prevented it from working on any other platform. The only use of the Wii Remote is a jump function and shaking it on occasion. I definitely would recommend this game to parents for their kids. Even if you are the one playing, de Blob is a great way to learn primary colors and secondary colors through mixing. In that sense, it can be a learning experience as well.