Bloop Review

I like my physics-based games, in all honesty liquid-physics is my favourite. Where’s My Water was one of the first Android games I paid money for, and I was fine with my wife paying for the iOS version too, and again with Where’s My Perry and Where’s My Water 2. So I was excited going into Bloop, a liquid physics-puzzler from first-time developer 2SD.

There are 42 levels in Bloop, all requiring you to get coloured liquids into their respective glass flasks. You do this by drawing straight platforms it runs along, before hopefully getting at least 60% of the liquid into the flask. You can also drag it, if you have enough energy, with the right mouse - though the energy does refill. Some of them use tilted lifts, others have moving obstacles or hazards.

The first thing I noticed was how unpolished the game is. Playing the game from Steam opens a splash screen with ‘Start’ on it, in a small window in the middle of the screen - you can also change your resolution and whether it should be full screen or not. However neither of those affects the splash screen. When I started the game, it crashed and told me to contact the developer. I figured I’d close all programs apart from Steam and restart - where it worked and showed me the main menu.

It’s all 2D and recommends a graphics card with 256mb VRAM - I have a graphics card with 500MB VRAM and yet could hear the fan spinning away as it heated up. There are more complex games that my specs barely match, yet I rarely hear my graphics card - and never with such a simple 2D game. This suggests a lack of optimisation, or an overuse of background effects.

The levels themselves are fairly bland, and the cutscenes (such as they are) appear to have been constructed in equal parts MS Paint and Adobe Flash. My enjoyment of a game is never solely about the graphics though, but in this case they don’t help. They tell a story about a scientist creating the titular Bloop using lots of electricity, then something eventually goes wrong.

The gameplay itself is solid, with the liquid reacting exactly how you would expect and the platforms easy to create and destroy. The tutorial text is pretty distracting, as it is full of poor grammar and the “Click to continue” is the same size as the rest, rather than being smaller as most games would make it.

In all, Bloop is kind of interesting but few of the puzzles offer a massive challenge. As it’s only £4 at full price, it’s not badly priced for what you get, but the bad grammar and poor optimisation bring it down.