It may be an early App Store entry, but there’s no harm in revisiting a title from a major publisher. Control schemes using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer may seem quaint now, but they were an intriguing idea during the summer of 2008, and THQ’s De Blob was one of the best in that department.
The accelerometer doesn’t work for all games, of course, and some people hate using it altogether, but I had no issues with it while playing De Blob. The premise is that I.N.K.T. Corporation has removed all the color from Chroma City, and only De Blob can defeat those nefarious I.N.K.T. agents. As you control De Blob, you change its color and grow its size, allowing you to splash colors on buildings and squash the bad guys.
De Blob’s App Store page boast “several exciting game modes,” but there are only three, including a training mode. Of the other two modes, Revolution takes you through the game’s levels in order, while Free Splash lets you revisit the levels you’ve completed and thus unlocked. Each level presents a variety of timed missions that you can take on for extra points while trying to complete your main objective, which involves painting enough buildings with various colors. You can combine the available primary hues into new shades, a trick that comes in handy during the higher levels. Fountains let you shed colors as well as reduce De Blob’s size.
De Blob is challenging, but the gameplay gets repetitive after a while and the ability to revisit levels in Free Splash mode isn’t that big of a deal. Once I completed a level, I didn’t really feel the urge to return, although there are trophies to earn for meeting certain thresholds, so if that’s your thing, you may get more replayability out of De Blob than I did. The game gets incrementally tougher as you work your way through Chroma City, since you’ll need to put on your strategic thinking cap to complete some of the objectives, but it never gets really hard. There are no difficulty settings to choose from.
The Bottom Line
De Blob is a unique concept that unfortunately becomes repetitive after a while. Maybe a sequel will push the gameplay in interesting directions.