This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Twitch Action Games, Crazy, Cool, or Kusoge. Additional details may be found in the original article.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out whether THQ Wireless’s De Blob ($7) was actually worth paying for. The screenshots didn’t exactly sell it, and we couldn’t figure out what type of game this was supposed to be from the descriptive text, either.
Well, here’s the skinny: you control a gelatinous blob that roams around an overhead map of a city, covering buildings and the ground in paint. You’re given certain targets to paint in certain colors, so properly locating paint canisters to transform your blob into the right color is one part of the challenge, and then growing it to a certain size—basically, by absorbing more or less paint—is another. Touch water and you can shrink down, which is sometimes necessary to squeeze through passageways; crash into friends to get new mission objectives, and enemies to knock them out.
What we really like about De Blob is its originality and sense of having been designed as a complete real game.
When you see how mediocre a job Audi A4 Challenge does at making an overhead map-based game exciting, De Blob’s constant action—even though it’s very imprecise based on touch-dependent controls—is at least legitimately fun. There are 16 different levels to go through, each with multiple mandatory and optional objectives, and though it’s possible to get a little distracted and lost, the interest level involved in finding the right paint colors and following arrows to tag targets is reasonably high by current iPhone game standards. The $7 asking price strikes us as high considering the overall quality of the art and control experience here, but there’s actual music in the title and enough levels that you’ll probably want to play through the whole game.
