Review: Boom Blox Bash Party (Wii)
Showing a canny understanding of the Wii market, where the cheapest looking titles, usually party games, tend to sell the most copies, Electronic Arts’ Boom Blox Bash Party not only has a naff title, but also sports appropriately cheap-looking boxart. EA hope this will be a winning combination at retail, and given what they’ve managed to do with just over a year’s development time, this title is more than deserving of success.
For the uninitiated, Boom Blox Bash Party is the sequel to a Wii-exclusive action puzzler released last summer that won wide praise for its unique gameplay that straddled the boundary between hardcore and casual more successfully than just about any other title since Peggle. It was the game’s unadulterated simplicity that really impressed. Tapping into the brain’s hardwired affinity for blowing stuff up, the core gameplay involves toppling towers of blocks by throwing balls at the screen. Like Jenga in reverse, but with explosives. Similarly, the control scheme is simplicity itself- you just point at the spot you want to throw the ball at, lock with the A button, make a throwing motion (your throwing speed determines the power) and release. Its a remarkably elegant and intuitive system that requires no learning, practice, or tutorials.
But what can the sequel deliver that the original couldn’t?
In the best tradition of sequels, Bash Party sets out to offer bigger, better, and more content than its predecessor. And its hard to argue that it doesn’t deliver on each of these promises. Wisely choosing not to reinvent a perfectly serviceable wheel, EA’s Los Angeles team left the basics untouched, and added in a whole lot of new content and modes.
Although this sequel is being marketed as a multiplayer-centric experience, Boom Blox lends itself just as well to single-player gaming. Not only does the game feature a much larger number of levels, but the bronze/gold/silver scoring system returns, providing a powerful incentive to perfect your score on each level. An Xbox-like achievement system only adds to the game’s addiction quotient, although with only pride rather than gamerpoints to play for, the effect is lessened.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the original title was that not only did the designers throw so many ideas, mechanics and modes into the experience, but that most of them worked, and worked really well. A few, however, like the extraneous shooting mode, have been either sidelined or removed entirely for the sequel. Bash Party doesn’t just trim the fat from the original, but its packed with a good number of new modes and mechanics. The slingshot tool in particular, while initially a bit fiddly, opens up a whole new world of Blox-flinging action that can stand proudly alongside the staple ball-throwing and Jenga-like grabbing actions that made the original such a darling of the media.
The sequel sees other nips and tucks, too: the occasional slowdown that marred some of the more complex levels in the first game is now all but gone. The background environments are far more detailed, and are now fully polygonal. Additionally, the new space and underwater environments radically alter the physics, and thus the gameplay, in interesting ways- a welcome change for experienced players.
But it is the new online features that can potentially give Bash Party legs well into the future. In a nod to the new reality of user-generated content, Bash Party enables you to download new levels from both EA’s designers and also other players. Facilitated by an enhanced Create Mode, players can to utilise the same toolset that the game’s level designers used to produce all the game’s included stages. Refreshingly, the system bypasses Nintendo’s often tiresome Wi-Fi Connection and Friend Code systems and links directly to EA’s servers. Presumably in an effort to discourage an avalanche of blox-related smut, however, user-submitted levels are subject to approval by EA (although levels are freely shareable between Wii Friends with no censorship). Levels download seamlessly and instantly, and if the originality of some players’ creations with the original title is replicated than you can be sure to be entertained by the community’s efforts. A quick browse through the available levels confirms this suspicion. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for those of you who felt left out of the user-generated content party started by LittleBigPlanet last year on PlayStation 3, Boom Blox is an excellent alternative outlet for your creative juices.
Despite the strong similarities, in just about every respect, Bash Party is a substantially superior game to its predecessor. A little like playing Super Mario 64 and Wii Sports for the first time, your first experience with Boom Blox will inevitably result in an ‘ahh…’ moment of gaming nirvana as the penny drops. The similarities of the sequel, though, mean that veterans of the original won’t be bowled over second time around in the same way.
It’s not perfect, mind you. The somewhat anaemic art style from the first game remains, and if you found the blocky critters from the original irritating and charmless, then you won’t be pleased to hear that they’re more ubiquitous than ever in this sequel. And while the controls make excellent use of the Wii Remote’s pointing capabilities, the game’s hyper-sensitive physics mean that gently manipulating objects with the controller in the ‘grab’ tool mode is still frustratingly difficult. In the grand scheme of things, though, this is nit-picking. Bash Party is just about the complete package, and is the Wii’s best exemplar of gaming that is both utterly casual and utterly hardcore at the same time.
Those of you who remained unmoved by the original will not be especially convinced by this sequel. But for those of us left with a blox-shaped void in our hearts upon completing the original, Bash Party not only hits the spot- but blows it to smithereens.
