E for All 2007: de Blob Impressions

By Rob Galbreath / Saturday, 20 October 2007

Rob Galbreath, Editor-in-Chief Originally developed by a group of college students, de Blob is a game that sees players controlling a rolling ball that is capable of mixing paints and performing jumps on to walls to color an otherwise monochrome city. Players must control the bouncy protagonist to jump and perform combos from one building to the next. While the game performs decently with the Wii Remote, there doesn't seem to be enough to hold a gamer's interest for a retail purchase just yet. When mixing a red Blob with yellow paint, the character becomes orange. When combining any other colors, the character changes accordingly. While this is fun at first, the game grows old quite quickly. Jumping from house to house, hitting things and painting areas to gain points doesn't make this a full fledged graffiti game like Jet Grind Radio, but more of an experiment seeking to gain unsuspecting gamers' money. Unless the game drastically improves over the next few months, I don't see much to be worthwhile. While news of multiplayer is reassuring, the demonstration only allowed one player. Yellow and red make orange. If you knew that already, you can play de Blob. de Blob offers some interesting controls, like jumping by flicking the controller rather than pressing a button. This is fun, no doubt, but the game seems relatively gimmicky and lacks any sense of direction. Sure, I want to throw paint at a house and run away, but there's still no real incentive to spend a good deal of time and money doing so. The real name of the game probably should have been "Wall Jumping Test #10," as de Blob perfects a wall-jumping technique with the Wii controller and the ability to paint buildings, but it's not much else other than avoiding black tar or losing your colors. Maybe the game will have a linear story about a certain INKT Corporation plaguing the world by taking away the color, or provide a better sandbox-style game, or even provide a little more than these jumping techniques to hit things. Whatever the case may be, de Blob requires a lot of work to convince anyone to buy it.