A quality, third party title for the Nintendo Wii is rarely seen. Although there are hundreds, if not thousands of games available for the Wii, few of them are actually worth the money that we pay for them, and even fewer of them are actually good. The biggest reason for this lack of quality gaming is because the Wii is dominated by the mindset of “family games” and “casual gamers”. The PR companies coined these two phrases long ago for all of the major gaming companies in Europe and those two phrases now actually mean shovelware to many gamers.
However, occasionally a game will come around from a third party for the casual market and it will not only appeal to gamers of olde, but also will be of a quality that’s close to that of Nintendo’s own home grown produce. One of these titles for the Wii is Boom Blox, from Electronic Arts, otherwise known as EA.
It’s hard to describe Boom Blox, as although it’s a puzzle game, it’s also so much more diverse. Essentially, Boom Blox is all about solving a few 3D puzzles and basically destroying everything in your path, with a few cute characters along the way. Yet, there are many different modes of play, which each allow the player to do something slightly different, but in the same line of thought.
There are various playing options, but the main ones are Play, Multiplayer and Level Editor. Inside of the Play Mode there are a couple of subcategories, which are Explore and Adventure mode. Both of these offer similar styles of play, but the Adventure mode will allow the player to use some form of gun/shooter whereas the Explore mode does not. Both of these modes offer a ridiculous amount of levels: in Adventure alone there are over sixty different levels of play.
Multiplayer offers the same dynamics as single player, just with someone else around, and the player is able to battle against them in various ways. The Level Editor mode is one of the best additions to the game, as it allows players to create their own levels. After playing through Explore for a while, it becomes apparent that it’s not always as easy as the player may initially think to destroy the area, and by creating levels, players are able to create levels as easy or as difficult as they want.
The actual game itself is very basic; the entire premise of the game is "knock things over." There are certain blocks that will explode on impact, other blocks will only explode if it touches a block of the same type and others just don’t do anything but move. Initially an entire game with this as the basic game pattern sounds boring, but the way that EA and Steven Spielberg have designed the game makes it one of the most enjoyable games on the Wii to date.
With a simple Gold, Silver or Bronze award system, each level is very re-playable and there is no penalty for not getting an award. To destroy the blocks may seem easy at first; however, to make sure that the blocks all fall in the right way with only one or two hits really isn’t easy at all. Owing to the very simple restart-level system, it takes seconds to restart the level if it’s not going right and then attempt to go for the Gold again.
Unlike many third party Wii games, the use of the Wii Remote is stellar. The accuracy of the Wii Remote is amazing, and it’s very easy to use the remote to choose certain options and to smash away certain blocks. It also recognises the force of the player’s throw, push and pull, which is very helpful in the Jenga style levels.
Yet, with all of this good, there is still a degree of bad. The menus throughout the game are fairly bulky and do take a little while to load, which isn’t really acceptable considering the fact that the game isn’t a graphics powerhouse. The menus each contain a little video preview of what the game may be like, which is a good idea in theory. However, the previews actually end up obscuring the view of the other options, and there is a fair lag between the video box appearing and the video loading.
Overall, the poor menu screens and poor loading times do not hinder the game, and the fact that the title is simply stunning makes up for those shortfalls that are apparent across a lot of casual games on the Wii at the moment.
