Token Female Gamer

What type of game would a world famous director make? The answer has now been revealed; digital Jenga, aka BoomBlox.

That’s right; Steven Spielberg broke barriers and slummed it with the computer game development geeks to make a game. It’s not clear how involved he really was. He is credited as being Creative Director (which could mean anything, participation wise). Most likely he contributed to high concept designs, played monthly builds, and gave feedback then.

Regardless of all that Mr. Spielberg joined the elite group of game developers that have their name over the title, and I’m sure that in his case it helped sell quite a few units. All those clueless soccer moms shopping for Christmas presents migrate to the one name that’s familiar to them.

My Impressions

I like jenga, I like puzzle games, but throwing a bowling ball at a stack of bricks is fun for only so long. Clearly the developers understood this since they added quite a bit of variety to the minimal bag of tricks a typical jenga game contains.

This is what kept me playing through the repetitive hump. Puzzle games have a proclivity to become monotonous and this game is no exception. They managed a good balance between introducing a new feature just around the time the previous one was mastered and getting stale.

Review

Release date: May 3, 2008
Website: http://www.ea.com/boomblox/home.jsp
Developer: EA at LA
Platform I played on: Wii

Game Summery

Push, pull, throw, get those blocks moving; try some finesse or use brute force, see what works best to score highest.

Game play

While the game takes its jenga roots to the next level, the basics of block moving are still the same. Either you push a block to move it or you pull it.
They added throwing to the repertoire. Throwing exiting items like bowling balls and bouncing balls, bombs and baseballs. These let you achieve different results depending on your goal.

On top of all that they added trick blocks. While some simply blow up, others might take away points or simply vanish when hit.
After playing for a while I mentally organized the puzzles into two different categories, force and finesse. While I found these categories to be fairly accurate, it should be noted that really all the puzzles require a bit of both. =)

Finesse puzzles revolve around removing blocks gingerly to either save as many creatures that are standing on top of the huge tower, or to avoid crashing the huge tower to pieces.

Force puzzles I categories more in the throwing the balls hard enough to wipe out all the blocks in one hit, or speed removing blocks to beat the clock.

The real goal of each puzzle is to earn enough points. There are a variety of win scenarios that range from simply felling the most blocks to gingerly removing the most without falling. Some scenarios want you to save creatures on or in the blocks and some want you to defend blocks against incoming creatures.

There really are a bunch of different types of situations that these few simple rules of block manipulation create and the game takes full advantage of them.

World and Story

Game play is divided into two sections, Adventure mode and Explorer Mode.

Adventure Mode lets you explore five unique worlds. Each world has a loose storyline that ties all the levels together with a theme.

The jungle world, for example, has quite a few levels where you have to assist the mother gorilla to get to her babies, and save them from the tiki men. There is also a Wild West world with chipmunk cowboys and bandits which includes a lots of shoot em ups. The Medieval world has little armored bears attacking helpless sheep characters, so lots of defense gets played there. And the scary world is filled with skeletons and ghouls to laser and helpless kittens to save.

Explorer Mode is all about raw puzzles which focus more on a particular skill. And while the cute graphics and characters are still there, they are just for eye candy and not for story emphasis.

Graphics

Super cute, almost Disney-like graphics. The cartoony art is epitomized in the character design. They are essentially anthropomorphized blocks. The little animal character faces were painted onto the block with little arms and legs stuck on the sides. It makes their movement quite comical.

Replay ability

There is quite a lot of content; exploring the different story worlds, honing your Wiimote skills, and mastering cooperative play.

The biggest highlight for replay ability is the ‘create your own puzzles’ tool. Of course replaying the puzzles to achieve the high score on every single one could definitely be motivation, for someone (not me!)

Multiplayer

Is a little underdeveloped. It harkens back the take turn style of jenga rather than the more innovative direction the single player takes.
Both cooperative and competitive are available, but seem to show little distinction between the two.

Things that bothered me

-Wii Mote response
This is something that happened infrequently. Or possibly it happened more but I just noticed it when I was pressed for time. My Wiimote seemed to have a response issue. I would click on a block to pick it up and nothing would happen. Maybe I just needed a better indication of when I had actually grabbed a block.

-Five million menu levels
Okay so it’s not quite five million, but it sure felt like it sometimes. Some people like deep menus; I like mine to be rather shallow, where I have the most information in one spot. This is instead of having to traverse multiple levels of menus to check on something.

-Weightless physics again
ARG! The scourge of video games has reared its ugly head. So imagine you are playing jenga and you are trying very hard to move a block as gently as possible. Now the block is only accessible to you via a string that is attached to one corner of the block. The block is the weight of a feather and seems to be completely frictionless so pretty much any motion makes it jitter around.

Crappy physics make me sad.

-Instructions aren’t very clear sometimes
Quite a few levels I had to play once to actually figure out what I was supposed to do. Especially with the story ones, they sometimes leave out rather important information to make room for more story. Its tend to not that big of an issue since the individual levels are over rather quick and easy to replay.

Time played

Around 6 hours, solo and group.

Game finished

The game tracks what percentage of the game you have completed rather than time. I have played through most of the solo stories and the skill challenges and it still claims that I have only completed 51%.

Rating

Mood Progression

Last Thoughts

There is to be an expansion. Soon!

Tags: arcade, cute, puzzle, Wii

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Console Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.