Boom Blox

By Sam Prescott

EA are everywhere these days. Not content to have a few fingers in a few pies, they’re instead up to theirs shoulders in pastry, and still digging. They’re developing for every system and the familiar branding assaults you as you walk into any game or electronics shop. Now they’ve teamed up with Steven Spielberg to develop the Wii’s latest puzzler. Boom Blox is the first game spawning from the director’s foray into the video games medium, and titles for Xbox 360 and PS3 are expected.

Boom Blox is a puzzle game designed to take maximum advantage of the complimentary relationship between the Wii remote and Havok physics engine, which EA have forged together. Word is they’ve done a stellar job. You’ll use the Wii remote to throw objects at a stack of blocks to knock them down – blowing them up, setting off chain reactions, or smacking them down with brute force (baseballs, other blocks, etc). A simple point, press, make-throwing-motion interface is used to work through the levels.

The physics engine means that the speed and power of your throw will translate directly on screen – if you don’t throw hard enough, you’ll fail to take out the blocks you’re aiming at. Getting this balance right will be a key challenge and should make for some good fun. Being a puzzler, the story is tipped to be weak and not much more than a filler to introduce the themed worlds on which you’ll play. If this isn’t going to bother you, then look forward to wreaking havoc level after level free of any linear or complex storyline.

Being a Nintendo development, the great unwashed expect a certain amount of unlockable content and other neat features: these, you can bet, will be included. There are also a number of various modes to play, including multi-player features. Vibrant looking worlds should make for interesting backdrops to unmitigated destruction. Here we have yet another title that ought to get you up off the couch and falling headlong into the game.

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