De Blob 2 Review

De Blob 2 carries on from the original storyline, set a couple of years after the previous game and involves the same characters. The original de Blob was predominantly available on the Wii and iOS platforms, but this sequel has been expanded onto the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Is this going to help it to reach a wider audience? Will it live up to the standards of the PS3 or Xbox competition?

De Blob 2 revolves around the emergence of an enigmatic priest called Papa Blanc – who is later revealed to be non other than Comrade Black, the supposed defeated villain from the previous game. Comrade Black can only be described as a black and grey blob of ink who wants to rid the metropolis of its glowing, vibrant colours to a monochrome and dull establishment. He also traps the citizens of the city, the Raydians, in suits that control them; hypnotising them and employing them as Graydians. So, you, playing the character of Blob, have to follow the path of destruction which Comrade Black/Papa Blanc leaves behind in a bid to rid this fictional world of him. So Blob has to go about restoring the colour and life into the city and its inhabitants.

So, how do you do this? Well, you start out as a blob of clear water and you are then introduced into jumping into pools of paint to colourise yourself. These pools of paint which are in colours of red, blue, yellow, brown, violet, green and orange. At a later stage of the game, you come across Paintbots which are mini-robots that contain the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow). When you smash into each Paintbot it actually mixes the colours together to create any four of the other colours. So if you smash into a red Paintbot and then you smash into a blue one, Blob turns violet; if you smash into a yellow one after then Blob will turn brown. When you are any colour, merely by touch you can colour in your surroundings.

You then go around and follow the direction of where the red question marks are. When you reach there the mission is explained to you either by your assistant Pinky, one of the Colour Underground team (they are known as the illegal ‘colourist’ organisation) or any of the civilians. These missions can be anything from liberating captured Graydians, restoring buildings to their former colourful glory, seizing back landmarks of the city by going inside them to colour everything in. After you have done all the missions on that level, you then unlock bonus missions. These can be done with ease as there is no time limit. It also gives you time to roam around and explore the island. Furthermore, you can get awards by painting all the trees in the level, rescuing all the Graydians and destroying all the INKT Corporation (the mass corporation controlled by Comrade Black) objects.

A key part of the game has to be the multiplayer aspect; there are two modes you can play, one being a party mode called ‘Blob Party’ which you play with a friend on a split-screen and you both play as a Blob, each painting the town. The player with the highest score at the end of the mission wins. This mode makes the mode quite competitive as no one want to finish last. The other is a co-op mode in which the two of you play either Blob or his assistant Pinky. Blob is the only character who can paint the city and Pinky assists Blob by shooting at the enemies using paint, she can help liberate Graydians, and she can also change his colour for him. The co-op is mainly aimed at the younger generation because it is a chance for guardians to aid them if they feel they are struggling with a level; the arty play is mainly aimed for the older age groups for its competitive feel.

As Blob goes along he has power-ups to help him out. One of the main ones he uses is ‘transform engine’ which changes the monochromatic world around him into its original polychromatic state automatically and opens the way ahead. Another power-up he has is ‘supercharge’ which is when you can charge enemies or objects without using any paint points.

This brings me straight onto my next point: how you attack enemies. When you absorb the paint in a pool, your size gradually increases giving you paint points and you use these paint points to paint buildings, enter city landmarks and attack enemies. By attacking enemies you can pounce on them using the automatic targeting system by pressing a specific button, or you can charge them. With some enemies it is advised to use different techniques depending on their weaknesses and strengths. One annoying thing about the automatic targeting system is the camera. It can sometimes leave you either disorientated because the camera pans around the way you don’t want it to, or it doesn’t move at all so you can’t see what you are doing. It can become a real pain, especially when you don’t have time to fiddle around with the camera view so you can see properly.

It may not be an enemy, but it is a certain knock-back when playing the game – ink. As the enemy is a blob of ink, it makes sense to have ink hazards scattered across the map that can harm you. When you go into a blob of ink you lose your colour and at the same time you start to lose paint points. Whilst you move around everything you touch turns back into greyscale (like with normal paints). The only way to rid you of the ink is to jump in water.

Furthermore, there are pickups which Blob can pick up to aid him in his quest or set a nice touch to the game. You can unlock artwork in the galleries that the player can look at; you can also obtain different styles and once picked up it automatically changes the pattern of the objects and buildings when painting. To help you, you can collect “inspiration” and you then start to collect a mass proportion of inspiration points. With these inspiration points you can buy upgrades to make the game easier. You can upgrade how many paint points you have, reduce the amount of paint points it costs to charge, increase the armour capacity one at a time, increase the life capacity of Blob by one and you can increase the paint capacity of your partner Pinky. You can also pick up armour, colour atoms which give a boost to your score, life, and extra time pickups.

Another issue with the game is the time constraints. On easy, I found that the time limit of over an hour was way too long and it wasn’t challenging enough; however that mode is mainly aimed at the younger audience. On normal, however, you have the opposite effect – we didn’t have enough time. We were given fifteen minutes to do the whole level; even though there were time add-ons there still wasn’t enough time given. This meant you had to rush through the levels on normal; sometimes you found that you had to do a level again because you ran out of time and the only way you could finish it was by doing the whole thing again because you knew what to do the second time through.

If you carry on with the standard course and do the missions like you are supposed to then not many time extensions are given (and in some cases, we couldn’t reach it because it automatically went into a tutorial forcing you to move on and not get the time extension). When you do come across them, you don’t get given a lot of extra time, so there isn’t much of an effect. Nevertheless, if you stray off the given course and do your own thing, you come across more time pickups. It is ridiculous because the more you stray off, the more time extensions you get, but you have to backtrack to where you came from to continue the mission.

Additionally, there are no checkpoints halfway through a level. So if you are confronting a massive piece of architecture which you have to climb, there is always the chance you may fall off. If you did fall off you could not go back and start from where you went slightly wrong, and plus your timer continues. This proved very irritating; especially when camera angles play a massive role in making it awkward to view and therefore making you fall below.

The graphics are very good and the visual style is unique and appealing to a younger audience. The animations are clean and crisp, and the 3D rendered graphics live up to the HD standards of Xbox and PS3 games. Also HD quality of the game really made the colours more vibrant and fluid. Furthermore, the little pre-rendered clip scenes that they feature are quirky and have a childish humour to them.

When playing the game you mainly play in a type of 3D third person format with the camera panning round as and when, however upon entering landmarks and buildings, you play it as a 2D platformer. As with most platformers, the foundations of the levels are quite samey and the missions also quite monotonous too. I felt the element of switching between 2D platform and 3D was a nice generic twist that made the game more enjoyable. Nonetheless, it did feel that the change was kind of thrown in left, right and centre which made that a shame.

All in all, I enjoyed the mechanics of the game; even if there were some let-downs. The repetition and the fact it got quite tedious way too quickly spoiled the experience of the game for me – alongside the infuriatingly stupid time constraints. I feel that the game is mainly geared toward the younger generations, but it’s the kind of game parents can easily jump into to give their children a helping hand when they got stuck. I feel the colour aspects works really well; especially hand-in-hand with the brilliantly rendered graphics. A definite for those kids who enjoy their colour and are looking for a simple game.