Boom Blox

May 16,2008 - With the Wii in its second year, it’s surprising that very few third-party developers have been able to create Wii-exclusive games that can please both hardcore and casual audiences. EA has tried a few times with Boogie, MySims and the Family Play forms of their sports games, but they’ve finally gotten it right with Boom Blox. This puzzle game mixes an intuitive control scheme with a Jenga-style game that centers on a playground where you play with gravity, knocking down structures in interesting ways.

Describing how Boom Blox works makes it seem much more complex than it really is, with several different ways to interact with the puzzles that are laid out in front of you. There’s the basic means to just toss a ball at a stack of blocks, trying to knock down all the crystal blocks with as few throws as possible. The others consist of adding new blocks that disappear when hit, explode, explode when two chemical blocks touch each other, and even a tool that allows you to grab blocks like a modified game of Jenga. As you progress through the series of challenges the game offers, you’ll get more powerful or interesting tools that take the same basic premise and up the ante a bit as you get more familiar with that particular part of the gameplay.

The controls in Boom Blox are as simple as it can get. You line up your shot by aiming where you’d like to throw the ball, press the A button, make a throwing motion however fast you’d like to throw the ball, and see the action unfold in front of you. With the grab tool, you at the block you’d like to pull out, press the A button, and pull in the right direction for a simple extraction. You can move the camera around by holding the B button and trying to find the ideal spot for the camera, though it would have been nice to see some freedom to zoom in a bit when you’ve got smaller blocks to grab and don’t have completely steady hands. The main issue with the controls tends to be for people that have had a history of problems with cursor-based Wii games where the cursor can be an issue that the set-up or Wii aren’t the problems, nor can they solve it. It’s often an issue to see the cursor locked in place when you’re pointing the Wii Remote off-screen, forcing you to shake it around until you can get the cursor back on the screen.

Boom Blox offers up a lot of content for both one play and up to four players. When you’re alone, you can choose between the challenge and adventure modes, which offers groups of challenges with two different sets of context for your actions. The challenge modes introduce you to the various styles of play, then grow in difficulty and add new things to up the ante on what you’re doing. The adventure mode is similar, but adds a somewhat unnecessary story to add context to what you’re doing while still offering more groups of unique challenges for different scenarios, which usually combine two or more styles of play into a set of new levels. These challenges offer bronze, silver, and gold goals, which help you open up new tools, characters, and items to use in the level creator. Beating those will open up expert versions of the challenge and adventure modes, which keep the fun going as you move through the these levels.

When you’ve got friends around, the party mode in Boom Blox offers a lot more fun that few Wii games have really been able to pull off so far. Party mode offers co-operative, competitive, and sampler modes that offer up more sets of levels to play against or with friends in ways that are more unique just because you have multiple people to compete with. The sampler mode’s probably the best mode for just pick-up-and-play multiplayer fun, as it picks random levels from the competitive mode into a playlist of games to compete with. The most interesting games that can be found in the party mode have to be the games with a stack of point blocks, where you and friends compete to knock down the blocks and not set-up a great fall for someone to take away from you, and castles, where you and your friends get block castles that you much knock down to push the crystal blocks off of their platforms. There are also fun Jenga-style games that are easily more entertaining, being a small part of this game, than the previous Wii game that focused entirely on the popular tabletop game.

Boom Blox isn’t going to be the most impressive game visually on the Wii, as it goes for a simple approach that works well for the game. The physics engine feels just right for a game that relies entirely on an expectation that tossing balls at a stack of blocks should look like you’d expect if you could erect a similar structure in real life. The cutesy characters that populate the backgrounds and the adventure work well enough as Lego-style block versions of dogs, monkeys, gorillas, sheep, bears, etc that you can also interact with, intentionally or not, if you want to test what you can do with the game. The game runs smoothly for a game that seems to have a more advanced physics engine than most on the Wii with a lot of objects appearing on screen at once, even just with a ton of small blocks or several larger blocks that have to be accounted for as they tumble to the ground.

If there’s a part of the game that is at its weakest, it has to be Boom Blox’s audio. With music that gets old as you hear it throughout the many hours you’ll play this game along and with friends, so you can easily just stick to playing the game muted and entertaining yourself in that department. Sound effects are standard fare, with plenty of explosions that add to the excitement of good throws in the appropriate levels featuring bomb or chemical blocks.

When it comes down to it, Boom Blox is a game that has a great, simple gameplay concept that’s executed very well to become one of the premiere third-party games on the Wii, especially when looking at your multiplayer options outside of the games that Nintendo has made which tend to come to mind first for multiplayer gaming. The biggest issue against Boom Blox has to be the $50 price tag on the game right now, which doesn’t really fit the game of this type that well, but your purchase will probably be vindicated once you see all the content that the game offers. The next thing EA should be doing is getting a hold of the Jenga license and putting these guys on that game to do the classic game some justice, which Atari couldn’t even do.

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