Boom Blox
A few days ago I was in a mood for buying a new Wii game and asked my Identi.ca followers for recommendations. @foosel and @tante highly recommended a game called Boom Blox.
Would it not have been for those personal recommendations and the very high Metacritic score I probably wouldn't have bought it.
Not because the game is bad (it isn't), but because I couldn't make sense of the description. The trailer shows a lot of ingame graphics but doesn't really explain what you do in the game either:
After having played the game I can understand why descriptions sound weird or are skipped all together when talking about the game.
Basically Boom Blox is a puzzle game with blocks. What you have to do with them varies widely from level to level. In some stages you need to remove as many blocks from some tower with out destroying it (think Jenga), in other levels you have to destroy that tower by throwing baseballs at it. Sometimes you only have a limited time, sometimes you can only do a limited number of moves. Again in other levels you have to clear the way for cute animal NPCs by moving the blocks. There even some arcade shooting range style levels.
Trying to describe the diversity of tasks in a few sentences is hard. The game contains over 300 different levels and comes with a built in level editor to create new ones.
What makes the game so amazing is the very accurate physics engine. Boom Blox takes into account with how much force and where your thrown ball hit a block and then calculates the movement of the block accordingly. Combined with the Wii controls for throwing or other manipulations, a very realistic experience is created.
You can unlock new levels and various goodies for the level creator in the single player mode. There's also a multi player mode for up to four players. And this is where the game is most fun in my opinion. You can either play against each other (using split screen) or working together in cooperative mode.
If you're looking for a new, different and fun Wii game definitively get Boom Blox.
PS: Careful, your arm will hurt from all the ball throwing 