De Blob is a platforming game made by Blue Tongue Entertainment for the Wii in 2008.  It’s a game in which you take to the streets and color in the world while fighting evil starfish.  It’s an interesting concept, but how does it translate into a game? Let’s find out in my mighty review of… De Blob!

De Blob starts off with the evil starfish Comrade Black and his army of the INKT corporation sucking all of the color out of the world and enslaving the citizens to *gasp* desk jobs.  Blob, being able to take on the color of any ink bot he smashes, is approached by a group of revolutionaries and takes on the task of saving the world, one location at a time.He does this by going around splatting paint everywhere until he finally reaches the color nazi headquarters for the final showdown with Comrade Black.

The story is passable, with cute cutscenes thrown in before each mission to explain the new level.  The villains are what I imagine minions would be like if they were actually cute and likeable (instead of annoying and insufferable).  The characters aren’t really fleshed out aside from the kinds of missions they send you on.  You have they typical brute, speedy kid, chummy professor, and spunky artist. Without any characterization I have no reason to be invested in these guys or their mission, but kids will probably find them fun to watch.

The music is fun and comes in a variety of genres, but it’s nothing that will stay in your head for a while, though I always appreciate it when a game allows the player to pick a song before playing each level. The graphics are pretty good.  Paint splats are everywhere and the draw distance is much larger than you’d expect from a Wii game.  When you touch almost any white or grey object in the game it becomes flooded with your color.  You can also collect different styles around the map that change the pattern of everything you color in.  And the big structures have beautiful designs.  The downside to the multicolored rainbow aesthetic is that it makes each location feel very samey despite the different themes.  The music level looks just like the skating level and so on, just with different structures. And for a game all about bringing life into a colorless world, the people sure are lifeless a lot of the time.

In De Blob, you paint everything.  It’s the game’s only real mechanic.  Just grab a color and touch something and it becomes that color.  You can get the three base colors of red, blue, and yellow, mix two to get purple, orange, and green, or mix all three to become brown.  Using brown makes the city look like its sewer system broke.  Each level consists of Blob getting a certain number of points by coloring things, finishing side objectives, and completing missions which open up gates to further parts of the level.  While you can just go through a level as quickly as possible, there are also side objectives that can be completed such as coloring every tree or saving all of the citizens.

The enemies you face along the way can be dealt with by slamming into them.  Different enemies can take different amounts of paint points to destroy and if you run out of paint and get hit, you die.  Some enemies will fire ink at you that must be dodged while others have melee attacks.  When inked Blob slowly loses paint points until he touches a source of clean water, though he can still stomp paint bots to get some life back to delay losing a life when the paint points hit zero.  Some enemies also require certain colors of ink to kill.  Unfortunately even though a game like this practically begs for boss fights there’s only one in the game and he’s the final boss.  And he’s pretty shit.

The missions in the game come from your fellow revolutionaries.  The artist makes you color certain buildings in certain patterns, the brute has you kill a certain number of inkies, the speedster has you race along smoke trails for a bit, and the professor has you use a certain color of paint to restore large buildings to their former glory.  None of these missions are particularly difficult and can be accomplished on the first or second try most of the time.  And by that I mean these missions are often so clearly laid out and linear that by level 3 I did them not to have fun, but rather as a way to make my points go up faster.

The levels in this game are huge, with the average time for each of the ten levels being a half hour or so, it can be very daunting starting a new level. And since there are no checkpoints, you won’t be able to stop and continue a level later.  While I would have prefered smaller chunks of say 15 minutes, they did at least make getting around the levels much easier with Z-jump panels that take you around the level in a flash.

The main problem with levels this long is that they get very repetitive very quickly.  With only 4 main mission types and levels that have a similar style (if you consider paint splashes to be a style) the ends of levels become more tedious than fun as you just do the same things over and over.  And that’s not even mentioning how much the repetition sinks in by the end of the game.

Still, if the game is fun then there’s no problem with repeating the fun, right?  Well, the game is fun.  It’s satisfying to paint an entire city and to crush all of the ink enemies in your way.  But the game has two major problems that get in the way of it being a real blast to play.  First, the camera.  The camera in this game really sucks, losing Blob as he falls to his doom or goes behind a building.  You can keep it behind Blob with the C button, but who wants to hold a button down the entire length of the game?  Not to mention that the camera takes a second to react to your movements and even then moves slowly keeping Blob out of your sight for longer than is comfortable in a platforming game.

The second issue comes with the controls.  The devs really shot themselves in the feet with this one.  To start off, Blob can do a wall run by jumping onto a wall and moving forward, but the problem is that he sticks to absolutely anything, making it so that when it’s time to get some precision platforming done you get really annoyed because this fucking blob is vacuumed to the wall.  You can hit the B button to force him to go down, but sometimes you have to ride over a bottomless pit, so that’s not the best idea.

Even when you want him on the wall he controls like shit. When he jumps off the wall it’s practically impossible to tell which direction he’s going to go.  And speaking of jumping the person who decided that Blob should jump with a flick of the Wiimote needs to go away, like right now, just go because holy shit is that inaccurate.  Well I’m sure that since such a vital function is given to an inaccurate input method the A button must be used for something really important, right?

De Blob is a passable game.  Even with the below average controls I only died once in the whole game.  Definitely not something I’ll be playing again soon, but it would definitely be a great game for younger kids.  Had the controls been tightened up a bit, the game could have been really fun, but at it stands De Blob is just a slightly above average game, which is why I’m giving it a slightly above average score of 6 out of 10.  Maybe the sequel is better, but I have no clue how I’d find that out (pull it over from behind the pillow).