I had a chance to load up Boom Blox last night for the first time and I must say I was very impressed.  The overall polish and presentation of the game alone are enough to keep you drawn in.  The very intuitive menus made it easy to go in an quickly run through the tutorials in under 5 minutes.  Immediately after the tutorials I dove into some quick multiplayer games with my girlfriend who was also extremely impressed with the game even though I would not consider her to be a gamer. 

Of the modes we tried, my favorite was the “pull mode” where you have a Jenga-like tower of great complexity and you have to slowly and steadily pull block pieces out of the tower without making the big -25 block on the top of the tower plummet to the ground.  The physics are very reliable so you can usually plan moves in advance by predicting how the structure will partially collapse when you move a certain block around.  This is especially fun when getting down to 2 long beams holding up the massive -25 block and passing the turn over to your opponent to see if they can remove one more block without making it fall.  And then seeing them accidentally touch two chemical blox together which creates an explosion and losing the game for them.  The wii remote accelerometer is really well implemented in this mode because you basically need to reach into the screen and slowly pull blocks out with the remote.  It feels very Virtual Realityish and 3Dish.

The other mode we tried was the regular beefy, sturdy tower with certain amount of points received for each block that you make fall.  The bigger the block the more points it’s worth.  This was fun because you get to throw the ball as hard as you can using the wii remote motion control.  It felt like pitching in Wii Sports baseball mode.  There were other modes we didn’t try yet such as launching blox at targets for points and theres a plumbing mode which looks cool too.  The different types of blox include chemical blox which explode on contact with each other, bomb blox that explode on contact with a ball you throw at them, grabbable blox that you can grab and swing around at other blox and vanishing blox that disappear when you hit them.  I am looking forward to creating my own levels and fine-tuning them for social events and possibly even drinking games!

Tags: boom blox, wii

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under Previews & Impressions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.