I recently played through de Blob 2 for the first time, and it’s something I had wanted to do since I first heard of it. To sum it up in one sentence, it’s a really charming game. If you want to “hear” more, keep reading below.
You play as Blob, who is part of a rebellion that want to stop Comrade Black and his army of ink-men from brainwashing the poeple and destroying the planet. Your goal is to paint everything you see.
The cutscenes of the game are beautiful, and I would love to have a cartoon of de Blob in the same style.
If you’ve played most any 3D platformer game, you’ll know how to play this. You mostly walk and jump. You also have a wallrun you can use to cross larger gaps, and sort of like Sonic you have a homing attack. Aim at any enemy or button and press jump and you’ll smash their heads. Be careful of their hats, though. Sometimes it’s better to use the charge attack, which is used to destroy certain enemies, boxes or walls.
The game consists of finding paint, sometimes a specific color, and painting what you can, be it people, trees or buildings. The paint can sometimes be found inside small robots and sometimes in pools, some of which needs to be filled before you can access the paint.
Most often this is done by entering a hole, which can require a certain amount of paint to access. In these holes the gameplay switches from the regular 3D platforming to 2D platforming while retaining the physics of the standard gameplay. Inside you must flip switches, press buttons and transform the place to complete the objectives, which is not far off from what you usually do.
The game has a time limit, which usually starts at 15 minutes. This isn’t enough time to finish the stage, so you must paint buildings and save citizens to get time bonuses, ranging from 30 to 180 seconds (as I remember). When you’ve finished the stage, there’s a post-mission state where the timer is off and you can freely do any side-missions.
You have two types of paint: primary and secondary. Primary are of course the colors red, blue, yellow. Secondary are the colors you get when you mix two colors together; orange, purple, green. There’s also brown, which is a combination of the three primary colors. In order to go back to a primary color, you either need to grab a color that’s part of your current color (eg red or blue if you’re purple), or soak yourself in water before grabbing the paint.
By getting soaked in water you lose your color. When you’ve lost your color, you turn white. This in turn makes the enemies unable to notice you, unless you walk into them. It also potentially makes you more vulnerable to attacks.
The physics of the game are very floaty, as walking into some obujects can make Blob fly into the air. This is frustrating at times, as there’s little to no air control. How far you jump is also based on how fast you move, so if you try to jump over a gap from a standing position, good luck getting to where you want.
The speed of the game is slow overall, for better or for worse. As you progress through the levels, they become larger, making them a slog to go through. This is especially annoying if you run out of lives, as the checkpoints in the game are far between, depending on how much you paint the environment. Checkpoints are always at the end of an area (of which there are three of in every stage), which isn’t nice when each area take a decent amount of time to complete. If you’re going for 100% completion, collect as much as you can during the timed phase, as if you get a game over in the post-mission phase, you’ll have to restart from the moment the post-mission phase was activated.
You can upgrade Blob in four ways: increase paint capacity, increase extra life capacity, increase shield capacity, and decrease charge cost. As you can see there’s no way to upgrade his speed nor the amount of time you get from collecting clocks, which is unfortunate as both those would improve the game. You can also upgrade Pinky, Blob’s friend and player 2, in one way, of which I’ve forgotten. Yes, there is a 2 player mode, but if you’ve played the Mario Galaxy games, you know it’s nothing special. You help player 1 deal with enemies, and you possibly collect stuff for them as well.
There’s plenty of enemy variety in the game. You’re usually introduced to one or two new enemies in each of the game’s stages. Plenty of enemies need to be taken care of in a certain way, such as charging, jumping or being a certain color. There are also a few boss fights that are pretty straight forward and shouldn’t be too tough.
The game also contains multiple power-ups, granting temporary boosts to Blob. There’s one that gives you an unlimited number of boosts, one (Rainbow) that paints any surface you touch in the color required, should there be one. Wrecking Ball turns you into, well, a wrecking ball, which allows you to roll underwater and attach to magnetic surfaces, but you cannot paint or jump. There’s also Regen, which is introduced later than Rainbow but is much less useful, as all it does is slowly regenerate your paint energy. There’s no way to cancel out of these, which can become annoying at parts when using Wrecking Ball.
The music might be the best part of the game. The music dynamically changes depending on how much the current part of the stage you’re in has been colored, with ambient sound playing in the blank areas and upbeat music playing in colored ones. Each time you paint something, a part of an instrument plays (think of how it is in Guitar Hero, the guitar plays when you hit the note, otherwise nothing), and what instrument it is depends on the color. Yellow is more jazzy, while purple is synthy. Brown is like a DJ scratching records, which is pretty clever.
There are collectibles of three types in the game: Cards, brushes and lightbulbs. Lightbulbs are used to upgrade Blob and Pinky and cards unlocks things in the gallery, such as concept art. I’m uncertain of what the brushes do, but it may be a score multiplier.
You get rankings on each stage based on how much of the mission you completed, with the best being S. To get S you must get all collectibles, paint all trees, boxes and people, and also beat a certain score.
Well I’ve been going on for long enough now, time to summarize. While the game has some flaws in the gameplay, these are rather minor and the other parts of the game more than make up for it. Had the game only been slightly faster and not as physics based, the result could have been extraordinary. If for nothing else, it’s a game that needs to be experienced due to its charming nature.