TL;DR – De Blob is a charming little game, that unfortunately De Sucks ma Boaby. The core premise of the game is pretty simple, De Blob is a fairly easy 3D platformer featuring you (the Blob) saving the world from the baddies. The way you save the world is simple, you slurp up colour into your blobby body and can then lock on to and attack enemies like in a 3D sonic the hedgehog game. Combat isn’t the focus of the game, but is a large enough part of it. As for the everything else, well the graphics are fine and the pacing of the game is pretty annoying while the music is good. So it’s a mixed bag, especially as it’s targetting the kids and I can’t help but feel that “the kids” at time of release would have been desperately trying to borrow an older sibling’s copy of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. Would I recommend De Blob? No.
I’ll start off by saying that hating on De Blob doesn’t feel great, because it’s clearly a cute little passion project that has some sensible design and started life as a Wii game. This means it’s fairly easy, the controls are a bit janky and that it’s targeting a younger and/or more casual audience. But honestly, who wouldn’t want to be a big colourful blob fighting some quasi-fascist meanies while painting the world and listening to some smooth tunes? It’s this thought that led to me buying the game, and it’s this thought that I cursed while struggling through the midway point of it. For some reason De Blob is one of those games that starts weak, then gets terrible before snapping out of it and having a couple of decent levels at the end. I can only imagine this is a big factor in the absolutely pitiful Xbox achievement completion rates, with around 1/4 players finishing the first level and less than 1 in 100 finishing all 10 levels. I am now part of that elite core, even though it only took like… 5 and a bit hours? De Blob is not Le Complicated, it’s a fairly simple platformer where you are trying to yoink colour from the world so that you can use it to paint things and jump-attack the baddies. The twist is that each stage has both a (very generous) timer and a scoring system, so you need to gain enough points to unlock the next part of each level. With each level having 3 or 4 parts. To help you SCOREMAXX you can complete various challenges, which have less generous timers and involve painting certain objects in certain colours, beating X number of designated baddies and platforming to a certain point following a fixed route. Then there’s a more substantial series of challenges, where basically you need to gather enough of a certain type of paint and then mash the A button. What makes these more substantial is the fact that they (sometimes) unlock new areas, while the rest never do. Which means most of the challenges are entirely optional, but they’re an easy way to get enough score to unlock the rest of the level and so they’re generally recommended.
The main other way to gain score is to… hold onto your hats… paint things! Considering this is the big gimmick of the game, that makes sense. The twist is that you’ll want to paint various items that are in the same group in different colours, as painting them all the same colour gives you 100% of the points, while 2 different gives you 200%, 3 gives you 300% and so on. There are 7 colours you can use, so in theory you can get up to 700% of the score for each group. If this sounds confusing (“wtf is a group” you might be wondering), then it’s just a semi-arbitrary way the game clusters buildings together. So if there are a bunch of apartment buildings, warehouses etc they will be split into Avenues and you’ll need to paint every one of them to get any score bonus. Once you’ve painted a group, the inhabitants will spill out and then you can paint them too! Don’t worry though, because they love it. You see the plot such as it is, features all of the colourful fun loving inhabitants of radia (radian?) getting INKED by the bad guys and now everything is drab and monotonous and boring and sucks. So Blob and La Revolucion are in town to paint everything and everyone and turn tank factories into wicked sick DJ buildings and so on. As you can probably tell, the plot is super basic but hey that’s fine. Mario never had a great plot either (shush JRPG fans no one cares). The game even has a bunch of short cutscenes between missions, with a heavy focus on slapstick physical humour and 0 words being used. It’s no Tom and Jerry but these are fine and honestly if I was like… 8 they might’ve been funny. Unfortunately I’m 28 and have a rich and fulfilling life blog so they weren’t quite for me.
But the cutscenes weren’t bad, and the core idea of painting a video game world is a fun one. So why am I not recommending this game??? Well the simple reason is that it’s just kind of annoying to control. Not only does the game love to show you when things are unlocked with a panoramic view of where this new doodad is located, but generally the platforming feels kind of iffy too. This means that during encounters or the mini-challenges, you’ll often fluff a jump which screws everything up because De Blob got De Stuck on a wall, due to the fact that he latches onto walls. Or maybe you wanted to jump-attack an enemy or lock onto an object you have to paint. Well too bad because De Blob wants to De Lock-on to some extra paint, with bonus points for the multiple occasions where this caused him to be Le Wrong Colour now and thus screwed up the pacing even more. Even if you can overlook this admittedly modest issues with the control scheme, the pacing of the game is just bizarre. Sometimes you’ve absolutely crushing it score-wise and other times you’re just looking for what handful of things you’ve missed and haven’t painted yet. For context, in both cases the best I’ve been able to achieve is a meagre Silver medal, so I can’t imagine the sheer hellish experience that is aiming for 100% completion in every level. Close to half the achievements involve painting EVERYTHING, whether it be EVERY TREE or EVERY BUILDING or whatever it is. If you know someone with OCD and despite them, then encouraging them to play De Blob is a good way to make them suffer.
Which is honestly a shame because it’s clear the developers weren’t total fools, there are some cases of smartly implemented player leniency related to narrowly beating out the clock during timed challenges. Plus the difficulty isn’t that high, while the soundtrack is pretty good so this should be a nice casual experience. I mean you get to choose your background track from a selection of around 11 and these also change the sound effects that play when you paint stuff, activate ultimate mode and so on. Yet it’s just a game that feels like a slog, because you’re just doing challenge after challenge after challenge and they’re all basically the same and then the game goes GOOD JOB NOW GO TO THE NEXT AREA. NO WE WON’T SHOW YOU WHERE IT IS WITH A MARKER, GO FIND IT. Again I feel like a loser for whining about the lack of markers, but sometimes the panoramic view is of an area you’ve never been to so you just kind of have to roll around until you figure out roughly where that one gate is. Oh and to add to the fun controls, there’s some occasional sections that require some relatively tight platforming performance lest you get hit by spikes or insta-killed by electricity. Which wouldn’t be a big issue, but the way damage and health works in De Blob is De Weird.
So I’ve already mentioned that you want to gain colour, the way it works is that you can have a maximum of 100 colour regardless of what colour that is. No you can’t store multiple colours, as you touch a new one it either mixes (so yellow + blue = green) or you just become that colour (e.g. green + blue = blue). It costs 1 colour to paint most objects in the game. Enemies also require a certain amount of colour to defeat. As do some objective types (the ones where you mash A). What does this mean? Well you might need to be green to colour in a set of buildings. Each building you colour in, costs 1 colour. To get more colour, you will no longer be green unless you can remix your colours to return to green. Defeating enemies also costs your green colour unless you are a different one. In the early game this isn’t really an issue, but later on most cost between 10 and 100 colour, so you need to be very careful with what you touch lest you be just 1 colour short of taking out that tank or objective. Then if you do hit by the bad guys, then you are INKED and lose colour every second or die once you hit 0 colour. So you need to spend health to damage the enemy, while being restricted in what health pickups you can take lest you be the wrong colour for the objective. It’s not challenging, it’s just kind of annoying that you might need to be Purple and then you accidentality brush up against some yellow pickup, meaning you are now brown, so you need to find a blue and a red while not touching anything, while getting hit by the enemies. Remember, this is a game where the control is kinda jank. In part because as you gain health, you are a bigger blob, so you move and jump slightly worse. Each of these mechanics is cool by itself, in combination they lead to irritating situations. Especially when the pacing kind of sucks, which it does for most of the levels (I’d say it turns around by level 8, but again there are only 10 levels).
The game also has some other content, including free paint mode where you can fart around each level for as long as you want and some side missions which I honestly haven’t played. Mainly because as stated, less than 1% of players even finished the game and I didn’t really have fun with it so… I think I’ve been unusually charitable towards it. I mean I bought, I tried it, I finished it, I even wrote a review about it. I can even still say the music is good, the premise is nice, the game world is charming and the way that you paint the world is satisfying. Unfortunately the gameplay which is pretty important for a videogame just feels rough. Like it has all the pieces, but the combination of a slightly rough control scheme with the specifics of the colour system, with the sluggishly paced levels and the repetition just makes what should be a short game feel like a grind. Which is ironic for a game in which you play as De Blog, De Hero of the world saving it from monotony. Much like Legendary I know the developers meant well and I’m glad they got the chance to make a sequel. Hopefully it fixes some of the quirks of this game and has better controls, less repetition and some other modest tweaks. Considering the final stages were actually fun, I can only assume De Blob 2 is a better game. Especially as it wasn’t developed for the Wii, so I can only assume it plays a bit better. With that being said, I’ll wrap up by saying that De Blob is just kind of a chore to play and I can’t really recommend it to anyone.