de Blob - Hands On Preview

De Blob is certainly a mixed bag. While it's essentially quite a simple game that's aimed directly at the family market, some of the gameplay features are actually pretty original. Developed by Australia's Blue Tongue Games, de Blob takes its roots from an indie project produced by Dutch students. Now, under the production lead of Nick Hagger, the 35 strong development team at Blue Tongue has moulded that concept into a top-of-the-line game for Wii and DS (our hands on focused on the Wii version).

Nick told us that Blue Tongue's influences in developing the game include Rez (for the dynamic music) and Katamari (for the way you roll around de Blob's environments picking up paint), although it reminded us of a SEGA Dreamcast classic, Jet Set Radio. This down-with-the-kids rollerblading game challenged players to skate around a city spray-painting walls and building up the game's backing track which, as you'll soon find out, has a lot in common with de Blob's central principals.

Comrade Black

De Blob's story is based on the formula of TV shows like The Simpsons, which Nick referred to as writing for adults and getting the kids for free. The game world is Chroma City, where Comrade Black and the evil I.N.K.T. Corporation has drained all the colours from the city, so all that remains now are various shades of grey. This story is told through CGI cut-scenes that are both humorous and cute, with the I.N.K.T. Corporation resembling an authoritarian dictatorship and the cities cuddly inhabitants depicted as joyful and fun loving creatures that yearn for the bright colours they once lived among.

Your job as de Blob is to bring colour back to the city by using the alien's ability to soak up paint. You can find the paint in bots around the game world by bringing up de Blob's compass with the A button and the more you fill him up with paint, the larger and more bloated he becomes, making the controls a bit heavier in the process. Although you'll only find the three primary colours in Chroma City (red, yellow, and blue), you can then mix these together to make the right colours for certain challenges.

For example, one challenge might require you to paint a city block green. Although it might be obvious to me and you that you'll need a 50/50 mix of yellow and blue, this might not be quite so straight forward to a five year-old. With de Blob being a 3+ PEGI rated game, it actually has some fairly educational applications in that respect, but educational gaming aside, it's also a lot of fun as you're tasked with painting various parts of the city different colours (we enjoyed literally painting the town red).

Second Nature

The controls are some of the most streamlined we've seen on the Wii. While they are very simple, they're also quite satisfying and don't become tiresome. All you'll need for the vast majority of gameplay is the Z button to lock onto objects, while flicking the Wii Remote forward makes de Blob jump. He can jump on I.N.K.T Corp. enemies to incapacitate them and belly-flop onto paint bots to absorb the colour, while flicking the Remote also makes him jump onto the walls of buildings. If you get the technique right, you can even vault between the walls of buildings without touching the ground as long as you time the flicks of your Remote right, which makes for a super quick paint job.

It's a control setup that's very easy to get used to and pretty soon you won't be giving it a second thought, which is more than we can say for some other Wii games with umpteen gestures and constant tutorial reminders. It also comes in handy when Blue Tongue decides to up the difficulty a bit by throwing in some platform sections and I.N.K.T. Corp. bad guys. One section we saw started with jumps between angled springboards that eventually got you to the top of a building. Once there, you had to get to effacing platforms in a well engineered use of the double jump. One leap put you in the air and then you had to lock onto a bad guy with the Z button before jumping again mid-flight.

Okay, so it's not exactly re-writing the rule book of games design, but it was easily accessible with a steep enough learning curve to keep the gameplay rolling along smoothly - perfect for some casual gaming fun. Another nice feature was the dynamic music, which builds as you add new colours to the cityscape. It's a funk 'n soul soundtrack that's been recorded by a 15 piece band. At the start of each level the music starts out basic, so you might just have a guitar accompaniment at the outset. As you paint more of the world and add more colours, additional effects and instruments are added (e.g. purple adds a 'Wah' effect to the guitar, while red brings in the sax), until you've got a groovy set of instruments in the mix. Each colour/instrument has 50-60 samples for each track and with 14 tracks in total, this makes for a good deal of variation in the music that builds as you paint.

Blue Tongue is estimating that there will be between 7-8 hours of gaming in de Blob for the average gamer (12-13 hours for collector types who want to complete everything), which is a little on the short side, although there is a dedicated multiplayer game for up to 4 players as well. It won't be online and opts for a classic split-screen approach instead that plays across eight different modes. Quite a few of these are purely adversarial modes, such as one that has players tagging as many walls as possible, but Blue Tongue has promised team modes as well which will certainly add to the family appeal.