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Boom Blox: Wii innovation at its finest
(by Caleb Rumley - July 23, 2008)
If only every game were as good as Boom Blox. Developed by EA and with assistance from Steven Spielberg, Boom Blox is definitely one of the most innovative and entertaining Wii games out today.
The concept is simple: using a complex physics engine, you must interact with stacks of bricks and solve puzzles. For example, there’s a stack of Jenga-style bricks that you must knock down. By waving the Wii Remote in a throwing motion, you can launch a baseball at it and knock it over. Simple. But the 300 other levels are much more difficult, and every 12 levels there’s a new game type which uses the Wii Remote in new and different ways.
A lot of games for the Wii can be described as “gimmicky” or “forced.” But Boom Blox couldn’t work on any other system, and the controls work so well you couldn’t imagine the game without the Wii remote.
You use the motion controls in three main ways: throw, grab, and shoot. Throwing is the main concept of the game. Armed with bowling balls, baseballs, coconuts, or any other crazy projectile, throwing balls at bricks is the most basic form of interaction. One game type might have you destroying towers to score points, the other might have you “mining” gold, or you might have to ward off enemy invaders simply with baseballs. The action is always changing, and there are a myriad of different obstacles and puzzles to take care of simply using your throwing arm.
The second key interaction tool is grab – using the tiny hand to remove bricks is a lot of fun. The creators have obviously taken cues from Jenga, but the virtual version is a lot more fun (and easier to set up) than the one in real life. An interesting take on the “remove the bricks” game had me precariously plucking bricks from four towers – all while making sure a lonely cow on top of the contraption never fell to an untimely death.
And the third mode is shoot. Using the Wii Remote as a target, you aim at the various enemies and knock them down, Time Crisis style. Like your typical shooter, you take out the tiny, block-shaped enemies. But compared to the other two modes, which require logical thinking in a 3D space, simply shooting enemies by reflex isn’t nearly as fun. Interacting with bricks is a lot more fun than just plane shooting them – but it’s a good thing that there aren’t too many shooting levels, because they’re not nearly as fun as the other modes in Boom Blox.
But what I found to be the most rewarding was the create mode. You’re given a huge space and thousands of combinations of bricks to work with, and you can create really amazing creations. I made several “Rube Goldberg” machines, which were a lot of fun to make. But it wasn’t easy – the game locked up on me once, and the physics engine seems to be a little dodgy. I often saved my contraptions, only to load them up and have them not work! I often worked for a few hours, fine tuning my creations, only to find them broken the next day.
While Boom Blox is a great game, it’s not perfect. It’s too bad that there are glitches in the Create mode – if not for that, the game would’ve had an even higher score. But Boom Blox is still one of the better Wii games out there, and you really should buy this game. It’s an excellent playing experience throughout. Boom Blox gets an 8.5 out of 10.
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