Boom Blox Bash Party

Review from AJ - Monday, 24 August 2009 @ 11:02pm

Initially I was pretty excited to get hold of Boom Blox Party. The whole house had a heap of fun with the original. Given that the sequel is really just more of the same, but with a bigger focus on multiplayer, you’d think it’d be a sure fire hit. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. The strengths of the original game are still there in spirit and with the new additions the game is worth the purchase price. At first glance the game doesn’t really feel like much more than expansion pack, and like most expansion packs whether it is worth a look depends on whether you have the original or not.

For the most part Boom Blox Bash Party is not a lot different from the first version. The bulk of the gameplay is the same, the bulk of the characters are the same, and the art work is all pretty much the same. The first variation is in the addition of a few extra “toys” and a few extra block types. The second, and more important variation, is the much improved multiplayer part of the game. I’d almost go so far as to say that the single player component is made redundant by multiplayer.

Bioshock...toon style

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t bother too much with the single player campaign. Yes it’s cute and fun, and a lot of the levels are quite challenging, but frankly I don’t think the new toys added much to the game play, and the rest of it felt kinda the same as the original (which I well and truly sickened myself of). Multiplayer on the other hand was a blast (pun intended!).

But first, the new stuff.....Boom Blox Bash Party includes 4 new toys to play with. The new toys include a canon, sling shot, virus ball and paint ball. The canon is like the old bomb toy, but now just requires aiming and shooting instead of throwing. Great for lazy players! The sling shot allows you to grab and fling any block (or character) across the screen. Whilst both toys are new, the outcomes are no different from any of the old toys, and are just a new method of achieving the same thing. The other two toys, however, mix things up a little. The virus ball is great for causing chain reactions, as the block you hit explodes and infects those around it (which then in turn explode, infecting those around them as well, etc etc). The paint ball is mostly used in multiplayer and is used for painting a section of blocks your colour for points. Nothing terribly exciting, but it does open up some new game styles.

Who doesn't love pirates??

In addition to the new toys, there are also several new Blox. Including Virus Blox (see above), Push Blox (which send objects flying off in another direction), Conveyor Blox (exactly what it sounds like) and Change Blox (which give a random number of points when hit). Whilst the Blox are amusing in the games designed for them, they don’t really add a whole lot to the game beyond that and clearly have just been added for the updated multiplayer games.

The biggest change to Boom Blox, and arguably the biggest reason to pick up the game, is the multiplayer. Unlike the original, in which multiplayer felt like an afterthought, Bash Party is almost entirely about multiplayer. Even the new toys and blocks are designed with this in mind. The canon and the paint ball particularly are geared specifically towards creating new methods of gameplay for multiplayer.

They're Blox, and they Boom....apparently.

There are two main multiplayer sections, Versus and Co-op. Co-op can be fun, but in reality unless you’re playing with a little brother/sister, you’ll spend most of your time in Versus mode. There are Jenga style games, games which require destroying each other’s “base” with canon fire, paint ball games where you try to take over as many of the blox as possible, standard point blox games, balance games and even table top games which require knocking all your opponents tiles of a board. Probably the best part of the multiplayer set up is the quickplay option which picks a random selection of games to play, from there it is winner takes all!

The strange thing here is that the multiplayer games provided act only as sampler. The game features seamless online “create and share” levels. It is dead easy to click the online button, and then browse through the hundreds of fan made levels, all ranked and rated. It works extremely well, as after you play each level you can quickly give it a rating. Levels you rate highly are easily found later, and simultaneously you’re helping everyone else sort the wheat from the chaff. I personally could never be bothered creating a level, but plenty of people have done a great job and it really extends the life of a game that otherwise would have a short shelf life.

Conveyors make things a little more interesting...emphasis on little.

Whilst most of the games are fun, the winner is more often than not determined by dumb luck. Whether it be a lucky shot, or an accidental chain reaction, or in the case of most the “destroy your opponent’s base” games the winner is determined by who gets killed the most. Yeah, seems odd I know. The idea is that the more damage you cop, the more shots you get in revenge. The strategy then is to play as crap as possible thereby not giving your opponent any revenge shots. It’s the Mario Kart game balance method that messes up the balance in an otherwise fun game. Whilst many of the other games are fun for a short while (particularly the Jenga games), the whole thing wears pretty thin pretty quickly; especially if you’d played the original to death.

Pros

Multiplayer is great fun "for families"
Online level sharing works very nicely
Same fun game as the original

Cons

Pretty much just the same fun game as the original
Too little too late - this is what should've been in the original