Recently named in ign's '20 Must Have Wii Games', but is it really worthy of such acclaim?

The Wii, aside from being home to various mini-game collections, is also the new home for family platformers (or at least it will be once the PS2 finally passes on). It also should be, although perhaps isn't, home to the quirky and original games. De Blob happily sits in both camps, it's bright colourful visuals, simple premise and entertaining cut scenes appealing across both demographics.

You play as the titular Blob who early on joins the resistance in the fight against the INKT. The joyless INKT have removed all the colour from the world and enslaved the Raydians to work in their factories. It’s up to you and the resistance to free the Raydians, take out the INKT and just generally spread some colour around.

Blob must smash paint capsules and collect the paint inside, with this he can take out enemies and paint the buildings by knocking into them. The paint pots only carry a certain amount of paint of which Blob can carry 100 in total, the pots themselves come in primary colours but can be mixed as required. Painting is a simple affair, by simply touching buildings and the like you’ll decorate them whichever colour Blob is carrying.

The levels are quite large affairs and are made up of multiple stages. Within each stage is the overriding task of earning enough points to unlock the gate to the next area, but dotted around the levels are various themed missions. The missions are split between landmark saving (use a certain amount of paint to free a building), racing along a marked route, fighting enemies, and colouring buildings in set colours. When you complete a level you’ll unlock 2 bonus missions and the Free Paint mode to play about it, which help to add a bit more to the game should you wish to hold off completing it, or return once you have.

The difficulty is pitched quite low, and once it reaches it’s the 3rd level it doesn’t seem to get any harder. So long as Blob is carrying pain the can’t die, if he gets inked then the paint points he’s carrying become a timer for how long you’ve got to find water and clean yourself. As a rule whenever you take a hit there’s a means to recovery somewhere within the local area. Control for the most part is responsive and tight, with movement assigned to the nunchuck’s analogue stick and jumping activated by flicking the remote. You target enemies by holding the Z button and swinging the remote, reminiscent of the Sonic games, and you have wall stick and wall roll moves also in your repertoire.

Right that’s all the functional stuff out of the way now the question of whether it’s actually any good or not. For starters the game looks great, the aesthetic choices of simplistic characters and functional looking buildings works well, it never once shows the Wii up. From the second you enter a level it is already more colourful and cheery than most games around at the minute, once you splash some paint around and liberate some buildings you get the video game equivalent of an Opal Fruit (down with Starburst!).

The cut scenes are fantastic, while not all of them are laugh out loud funny, they are all entertaining and look superb. Based on the evidence of some of the better cut scenes the de Blob franchise could easily become a children’s cartoon series. Both the peripheral characters and the enemy characters have bags of character, so much in fact that Blob looks dull in comparison. Worth mentioning is that this humour is displayed outside of cut scenes too with some wonderfully animated enemy soldiers.

It’s not all smooth sailing however, de Blob has a few niggles. Firstly while the controls are perfectly acceptable for the most part jumping in particular can be a bit sporadic, it’s hard to say whether this is an issue with the remote or just a design flaw. The camera also has some questionable moments, spinning around at inopportune times and panicking whenever it gets close to a wall.

There’s also the design choice where by as Blob fills up on paint he becomes more sluggish to control. It’s a nice idea in principle, but as you regularly need to be carrying around copious amounts of paint whilst traversing various platforms and buildings it makes things more frustrating than the need to be. The wall stick is also an issue, Blob sticks to everything and you will lose track of the amount of times you go hurtling off a building because you didn’t notice you were stuck to it. The wall roll works well but is underused, aside from painting posters and traversing gaps on the final level it is hardly ever used in gameplay. The roll and wall jump could have been used far more effectively to expand on the games plat forming.

The in-stage missions can begin to grate around the midway point too. While freeing buildings from the grip of the INKT and taking on soldiers never gets old, the race missions feel like you’re being led by the hand to the next part of the level. The colouring missions are by far the most annoying, coupled with the slightly unreliable camera and the sometimes sluggish controls these will be the ones you’ll be tempted to avoid and the ones you’ll fail the most.

It’s good news then that failing missions just means you have to retry them, and more often than not parts you’re already completed will remain as you left them, making the whole thing easier. This works because it’s not the difficulty that makes the game, it’s really the compulsive OCD aspect of colouring everything, freeing everyone, and taking out all the soldiers. Helped by an end of level score chart of how many of these sub-tasks (posters painted, Raydians freed, etc), you will stay in levels far longer than you really need to, reaching the required score multiple times over.

At its best de Blob reminds me of Jet Set Radio, and with a bit more time been spent on the controls and making the most of dynamics and the wonderful level design then this could have been a truly stellar platform game. De Blob has enough compulsion to keep seasoned gamers hooked, and is simple, forgiving and colourful enough to appeal to younger gamers. This is perhaps its biggest downfall, it falls somewhere in between and as such is recommended with a ‘but’.

With some work developing the ideas already in the game de Blob could have become a very good game, as it is it's already more than worth your time and likely destined to become a cult classic (or more likely an obscurity). A shame as it deserves better, it is instantly enjoyable, funny and packed with great ideas.

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