Some people will tell you that de Blob 2 is a charming family-friendly game that has been criminally underlooked by the hardcore gaming masses that form the vast majority of Xbox and PlayStation ownership. They will tell you that it’s worth 9/10 review scores, and that you should give it a go.
These people are smoking crack. Or possibly just haven’t played beyond the half way point in the game.
Family friendly? I have screamed, sworn, and shouted more at this game than any other I can remember this generation. At least when I was playing Kane & Lynch 2 I could just put it down as a bad third person shooter with inconsistant cover mechanics and horribly weak weapons. With de Blob 2 the good game is hidden so deeply as to be almost impossible to find.
Despite, as reviewers will agree, it starting off quite well.
Screw it, let’s take this sucker apart point by point.
Crime 1 – The camera is awful.
Lots of third person games get this wrong, I have no idea why or how, since Mario got it working fine. I can maybe excuse a poor camera in a game that’s all tight interiors and busy geometry. But de Blob 2 (hereafter “the accused”) is primarily open spaces and simple geometric solids.
It’s frequently looking the wrong way, and most bafflingly often fights against your attempts to move it while it obstructs your view of the hazards in front of you. From this I’m guessing that it’s following pre-set paths and directional cues. Which would be fine, if the cues were helpful and didn’t leave you having to make leaps of faith with alarming regularity.
Crime 2 – The levels are too long, made up of too many repetitive tasks.
Levels being too long? How can anybody complain about long levels? Working your way to the top of a tower so that you can press a button is fun, right? So it’ll be fun if you have to them repeat that same task, with only minor variations in layout, six more times to complete the level.
The accused takes repetition to ridiculous lengths. Nothing is ever achieved by performing a task once. Every blockage requires at least two identical guard towers to be destroyed, or three prisoners to be released, or four buttons to be pressed, or five groups of enemies to be killed.
As far too long, just get used to the idea that you’ll be back-tracking a lot in this game. Once a level’s main tasks have been completed there are usually a handful of warp points for fast-travel, offered as some concession, but they are always too widely spaced out, and you’ll always still end up having to wander for five or ten minutes to get to the area you wanted to be in.
Crime 3 – The controls often don’t give you enough control.
Blob (that’s the name of “de Blob”, if you hadn’t guessed) has a wide range of moves at his disposal. He can jump, duck, dash, jump off walls, and wall run (of course, even coloured blobs are these days capable of parkour that would make the original prince of Persia green with envy).
Almost all of his moves are context sensitive, and the contexts have been created by an imbecile. Jumping on to a wall will stick him in that location while a little timer counts down, even if he’s just pixels from the ledge that you were trying to jump up on to.
Combat is largely achieved by locking on to an enemy and then dashing in to, or jumping on to, them. This works fine when there’s not much going on, but in later levels when there are many enemies – often with each only being able to be destroyed by Blob while he’s a specific colour, or with some being immune to being jumped on and others who shouldn’t be dashed at – the lock on will rarely pick intelligently, and will most likely result in you attacking the wrong foe. Unless you take time to lock on then manually select a new enemy, but you won’t have time to as you’re being attacked with flamethrowers, rockets, hypnotic disks that remove your controls completely and drag you towards danger while you hammer the ‘B’ button.
Stop me if any of this sounds like fun, but that leads us on to…
Crime 4 – There are too many varieties of everything.
Enemies come in many shapes and sizes, and there are usually a few variations of each of those. There are pads in the landscape that facilitate travelling in a specific way, but the pads all look exactly the same. Seven different colours that you can paint yourself (three primary, three secondary, and brown – frankly I prefer the landscape grey to painting it brown). A variety of switch types. Numerous special power ups that you can collect that each change your status in a different way, but all have fairly similar-looking icons.
It all quickly multiplies together to make a confusing mess of the levels. You’re never entirely sure which colour it is best for you to be, what a power up will do to you, how to defeat a cluster of enemies (especially since in later levels they’re in mixed groups that almost guarantees you losing some health as killing some will leave you exposed to attack from the others).
Portal made an entire game’s worth of puzzles out of a tiny number of unique elements. The accused doesn’t even manage one level before unnecessarily complicating matters. Less is more.
Crime 5 – Horrible in-game cutscenes.
The accused doesn’t believe in “show, don’t tell”. It goes for “tell, then show, and then show again just in case they’d forgotten. Then tell them again, just to check”. It’s littered with horrible charmless cutscenes with ugly camera angles and swooping interpolations to show you every step of the route you’ll need to take (rather than, for example, designing the levels so the paths are clear without this nonsense).
It’s also not above interrupting gameplay to tell you about something you already know (on the second to last level I was instructed through an annoying scene to avoid stepping on the heat plates, despite these having featured in at least the previous half dozen levels). Some are skippable, many of the very short ones aren’t – but these really short ones are the most repetitive and quickly add up over the game time you’ll watch them.
If you ever do play the accused, you’ll probably think I’m over-reacting at first because it also features some genuinely funny between mission vignettes. These lure you in to believing that the entire game will have character, charm, and a sense of comedic timing. Then later you’ll realise that the majority of the cutscenes you’ve watched contain little more than a static character with some poorly written “hip” dialogue onscreen (there’s no voice acting, everything is “spoken” in gibberish).
You’ll spend a lot of the game just wanting to play, but with the feeling that it’s deliberately wasting your time. Which brings us on to…
Crime 6 – Arbitrary time limits.
This is, for me, the big one. The crime that effectively stopped my progression through the game (on the second to last level), and ensured I hadn’t been enjoying it for a while before then.
For some wrong-headed reason you have a time limit to complete every level. It starts at somewhere around the nine minute mark, and can be extended by collecting little clock pick ups (which come in two flavours, of course, to give you either a big or little boost).
Generally the pick-ups spawn when you complete level requirements, but they also sometimes appear when you complete the side quests, or find one of the other random collectible types. The thing is, because you’re under pressure from the global time limit (and you’re never really entirely sure how close you are to the end of a level – though the goal appears to be close you may have to unexpectedly hit five switches to access it) you never feel like it’s a good idea to veer off piste and explore.
A platform game with huge levels that contain a scattering of bonus objectives and collectibles for you to find, that encourages you, through one stupid design decision, to rush through as efficiently as you can. Then when a level’s main goal is completed and the time limit vanishes, you have to backtrack across the entire huge level to mop up as best you can.
It’s not even there for any story-driven reason, as far as I can tell. If your enemies had a weapon that would ensure their complete victory in ten minutes time, that would make sense. It’s purely gameplay design driven.
But it gets worse! If you fail a level due to running out of time you have two options. You can choose to restart the level from the beginning (the whole massive, repetitive level – perhaps 30 minutes of gameplay you’ve already done), and possibly still not have enough time when you get to the end if you don’t hurry. Or you can choose to restart from the most recent checkpoint, with however little time you had before – so obviously you’re going to fail again, because there’s not enough time to complete the level from that checkpoint, as you’ve just proved.
Hnrgh.
Happy Ending
But hey! Hey! Hey.
Let’s not end this on a sour note. Let’s look at the possible improvements that could be made to a hypothetical de Blob 3. Well, obviously the time limits need to go. Probably also get rid of whoever put them in in the first place, because their opinions are not to be trusted.
Identify what makes playing the character of Blob fun and unique. Is it jumping on enemies with a big splat of paint to colour them, or is it sneaking around to avoid being shot out of the sky by homing missiles? Is it painting over propaganda billboards in a variety of colours, or wall running and flipping? Is it smashing things that suddenly paint a large area, or having to run around looking for some water when you’ve been inked? Scrap anything that’s not on the list, it’s just distracting from the fun, and spoiling your game.
I would increase the number of levels, but make each much shorter and snappier with fewer repeated tasks. It’ll make players feel like they are progressing more quickly, even if technically they aren’t.
Cut down on the pointless varieties of everything. A few enemies do almost the same thing, this is silly. Each type should look and feel distinct. Then to increase the apparent variety and stop visual fatigue setting in, dress them up themed for levels. So the standard enemy in the city levels looks different from the standard enemy in the zoo levels, or in the TV studio levels.
Finally, I’d recommend employing someone who can write a half-way decent 3d follow camera, and getting some of the guys who make your between level cutscenes to take a look over every camera that a designer has placed in a level (I know these guys are probably an outsourced animation studio – maybe you could get a camera guy in-house as well).
