de Blob 2 review [Wii/360/PS3]

Posted February 25, 2011 by beefjack.

[Reviewed on Wii]

And lo, on the eighth day, Blob said, “Let there be colour.” And the world filled with a vibrant mix of reds, blues and yellows. And Blob saw it, and he deemed it better than average.

That’s a quote from the Blobspel. I hope you don’t doubt it, dear reader. It’s mostly accurate. de Blob 2 is delightful for the most part. Let me break it down for you. Straight outta the mouth of Funkmaster B. That’s right, I’m talking like this. Don’t try and stop me. I have momentum, biznitch.

After defeating Comrade Black in the first game, Blob and friendly “sass-bot” Pinky (yes, I know) are called on to do it all over again.

Comrade Black is a monochrome ink-stain upon the planet. A tiny, ruthless dictator. He wants everything in black and white. It is not explained why. Perhaps because profile pictures look more stylish that way. It’s up to Blob and his friends in the Colour Underground to paint everything and return colour to Prisma City.

You do this by dipping into pools of colour and smearing yourself all over buildings. In any civilised society, such behaviour would not be encouraged. And in fact, in Prisma City, it is equally unlawful. Guards of various power and ability, called Inkies, will try to stop you from doing so, squinting and swinging their truncheons around. The adorable Israeli border guards to your gelatinous, multicoloured Banksy.

By slamming into paintbots – spider-like containers of colour that scurry around – you can mix red, blue and yellow into secondary colours. Any basic colour combination you didn’t learn in art and design class will soon be firmly plastered to your brain.

The platforming itself is very basic. Jump from one place to the other, brightening the world up and stomping on baddies as you go. The joy comes not through progression, not through jumping from one futuristic cruise ship to another. It comes through the sound of jumping. The notes of a flat surface. The music of progress.

Each colour has an instrument mapped to it. Every time you touch something as a certain colour and paint it in, the instrument plays a little ditty. It’s the philosophy of synaesthesia-based twin-stick shmups like Everyday Shooter, applied to the platforming genre.

The result is a bewildered and smile-raising mix of jazz and funk and action and colour. You hurtle over bridges as a yellow ball of trumpet. You reel across rooftops as a red spatter of saxophone. You scratch along walls as a brown blob of turntable. With such freeform music, you’d expect it to sometimes sound jarring. Oddly, it rarely does.

The backing track and style of music shift with each level. Some are more interesting and catchy than others. But it usually adheres to a particular genre. The genre of Funking Awesome.

The movement of Blob (and in particular his unenthusiastic jump) is not always as fluid. You can “wall-run” for a small amount of time but it is mapped to the same button as jump. The same button is also used for activating side missions. This makes Blob a sad Blob. With some extra streamlining de Blob 2 could have been the perfect mix of Sonic Adventure blue and Jet Set Radio red. A sort of Jet Sonic Radio purple. At the moment there is slightly too much blue. Not enough funky, funky red.

The camera is the game’s major failure. It is difficult to get the camera right in third-person platformers, it should be stressed. But the days of the camera automatically zooming in stupid-close, or not turning because your character is in a relatively confined space, are days I’d like to see behind me. To say that the camera in de Blob 2 has a mind of its own would be wrong. It has nine. And they’re all drunk. One is on psychoactive drugs. Another is a leery paedophile, I’m almost sure of it.

Still, it’s a single major failing. You can probably get over it. The only other minor issue is that all the flubbering around can get repetitive. Though there are some neat gravity-based antics later in the game, every level prior to these essentially boils down to you wandering about painting houses and billboards, freeing citizens and crushing inkies (with Pinky if you’re playing two player co-op).

Flaws are made up for. Props (yes, I’m still speaking like this) should go to the animation peeps who produced the short cinematics between levels. They’re great. Every single one is worth a chuckle, capturing the wordless humour of Wall-E and fusing it with the adorable violence of the original Worms animations.

An early one sees an election held in Prisma city. A red citizen wanders in and hmmms at the ballot screen. His hand hovers over the red candidate. Suddenly a mechanical hand emerges from the booth wall and grabs the citizen’s finger.

He struggles, fighting the force of the machine grasp as it pulls his finger towards Papa Blanc, a monochrome candidate who hates all “colourists.” But it is too late. The citizen has been forced. His finger presses down. He has voted black and white. The machine hand releases him and pats him on the head. Good, obedient citizen. In adjacent booths a built man is getting slapped, a short woman is being beaten with a stick.

This isn’t the only piece of general political satire in the game. de Blob 2 is so pro-democracy it should be air-dropped into Libya with a sticker attached saying “keep going”.

It might not compete with the refined playfulness of LittleBigPlanet 2, but this well-delivered kindly message – of individualism and artistic freedom – is a good enough reason why this is a game for your kids. Don’t have kids? Man up and father some children! (Or mother some).

de Blob 2 cannot be capitalised at the beginning of this sentence, which is frustrating. But it’s a frustration on a par with the annoying camera and imperfect controls of the game itself. That is to say, it’s negligible. When something is this stylish, quirky and cheerful, it’s just unsporting to be pedantic.

Brendan Caldwell