Boom Blox review

Boom Blox was designed in conjunction with film aficionado Steven Spielberg, so at first, Gamestyle was quite surprised by the lack of aliens, but then we were surprised by how deep and satisfying this admittedly casual looking game turned out to be. In the most basic ways, Boom Blox boils down to some sort of twisted and manic version of Jenga, but throw in some explosions, chemicals and lasers and you have a brilliantly addictive and fun game that is deep enough for hardcore gamers to enjoy, but accessible to all ages, probably making it the most well rounded Wii game available.The game features 300 puzzles based around demolishing blocks in a myriad of fun ways. These include using the Wiimote to hurl baseballs at towers of blocks of gems and demolish them with the minimum amount of throws, using bombs to fight off a hoard of block eating bears, using a hose to redirect the angle of a falling tower, and other ways too numerous to list. Each puzzle has a bronze, silver, and gold medal up for grabs. Earning a bronze is the minimum required to unlock the next challenge, while silver and gold are awarded by performing better than the minimum requirements to beat the level. For example most of the early baseball puzzles award a bronze for knocking down the towers within 8-6 throws, while gold is won by demolishing it with one well placed shot. While just unlocking the next puzzle may suffice for some, many will find themselves going back to the puzzles and try and find that one spot to make the tower crumble, partly to beat their friends, partly to feel like a great demolition expert. As the puzzles become harder, so do the requirements for getting gold medals. However theres not really a lot of incentive to get the gold medals, aside from getting more rather useless junk for the create mode. While some of the harder puzzles will drive you round the bend if youre not bothered about mastering everything, then the single player is quite short lived.The excellent multiplayer adds even more value to package, allowing you to compete across the various puzzles, or play co-operatively, working together to solve them. Its great fun and becomes even more immense when you factor in that you can also create the puzzles yourself, snickering with delight as you watch your friends try to solve a fiendish puzzle of your own design, or cry with grief after they solve it in three seconds flat. Brilliantly, you can share these puzzles with your friends over the WiiConnect service, but there are no other online options whatsoever, a tragedy in some respects.The simplicity of Boom Blox lets it down in some areas, the graphics are great and the sound on offer rarely impresses, but quite frankly these arent even issues, theyre just statements of fact. If youre moaning about the graphics in this game you obviously dont get it. There are few real problems with the game, the first being that reticule/pointer/whatever you call it is incredibly sensitive, which can make the pin-point accuracy required in some of the puzzles quite hard to pull off, though perseverance will eventually see you through. The other is sometimes the puzzle solving aspect comes down to sheer dumb luck in the single player. Youll figure out exactly what youll need to do to complete a puzzle, but because of the realistic physics it can be impossible to predict exactly what will happen when you move a particular block, or throw the baseball. Youll pick the exact location, but the randomness of how the blocks fall will play a factor and the only way to get that gold medal is to do exactly what you did before and hope the blocks fall differently. Another issue is that too many of the multiplayer levels are just simple shooting gallery levels where you score points for blasting moving targets, as these pale in comparison to the actual puzzles. However, at the end of the day these issues dont ruin the game, just take the polish off a little. Boom Blox is an excellent, well rounded title. Its incredibly accessibly but deceptively deep and can be enjoyed by pretty much everyone. There are certainly better proper games available for the system, but Boom Blox successfully straddles the gulf between the casual and traditional gamer, making it an essential purchase for most Wii owners.