Overview
An evil company known as the INKT Corporation has sucked all the color out of Chroma City and it’s up to you, an amorphous blob of paint to restore it. While this story is a little silly, it actually gave me some rebellious compulsion to press forward in the game. The main story mode is called “Revolution” and the dialog with NPCs adds an underground feel to your actions. This makes (re)painting the city much more satisfying than it might be otherwise.
Features
Choose your preferred control style. You can calibrate the zero tilt and the overall sensitivity, which is a nice bonus. My opinion? Touch control’s got the edge.
This game has Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-style objectives in each level that’ll earn you stars. What do the stars ultimately get you? I’m not sure, but for some reason I worked pretty hard for them.
The graphics aren’t super-gorgeous, but the colors are bright and watching the city go from grey to multi-colored is plenty pleasing. The soundtrack was also fun and added some bounce to the game.
Breakdown
The Good:
While I haven’t played De Blob for the Wii, I understand it features similar gameplay. Console-to-mobile adaptations aren’t always so great, and I was wondering how good the quality would be for this app. My fears were unfounded - the game plays just fine, and I am more interested than ever to check out the full-featured version.
I feel De Blob possesses some sort of character that makes it more fun than it should be to play. Careening around a city bashing into buildings and watching them change color is the central gameplay here, and that might get stale after a while. However, as I mentioned in the overview, the game’s story creates the sense that with every building you re-color you’re sticking it to the man a little bit.
The challenges were both broad and deep enough to keep me interested for a fair amount of time. There are 5 stars to be earned in each level, but some are somewhat mutually exclusive. For instance, if you’re attempting the time trial star, you likely won’t have time to get the high score star and vice-versa. To max out your score and rating, you can aim for “color harmony”, which encourages you to paint the city in as much of one color as you can.
The Bad:
The controls were a little less responsive than I would have liked. Both tilt and touch controls lacked any sort of snap or quick turning. Since there are parts in the game where a modicum of precision is required, this was mildly annoying. When you get covered in ink and every building you bump into returns to grey, it’d be nice to be in control of whether or not you bump into a building. However, aside from being annoying, this didn’t detract too much from the gameplay - the score lost wasn’t huge.
Later in the game, the sheer number of enemies made it tough to get around. I might have preferred to just be able to complete the objectives and play. It was extremely frustrating getting covered in ink every thirty seconds, especially since it was so hard to avoid. This did provide some challenge that I felt was missing in the early stages though.
Verdict
De Blob is fairly well put-together. The gameplay is fun, the controls work well enough to play, though they’re not the smoothest, and the graphics serve their purpose. The music was great - very upbeat and good music to paint the city to. Something about the character of the game makes it more than the sum of its parts, and that’s why I think it’s a good addition to the games library of anyone who
