Graphics: I have conflicting thoughts about Blast Works, but I need to give credit where credit’s due; its graphics are really a ton of fun. You can build whatever you can imagine. The graphics aren’t great because they create realistically modeled objects; they are great because they are diverse and colorful. One of my favorite examples is a pre-rendered stage called “Paper Attack”. Your ship is a slick paper airplane, which flies through various rooms of a house while being attacked by paperclips and staplers. The shapes are clean and are wonderfully animated. In the background are sinks, bookshelves and toilets, which promote the illusion of a real home. With such a wide spectrum of colors and shapes from which to choose, the editor can create almost anything and place it anywhere in the scene.

Interface: The real interface in this game is the Blast Works editor, which allows the player to create his or her own scenarios. The key word in that phrase is “allow.” I feel that many critics have been touting this engine as the source of Blast Works‘ high marks, and I’ll admit that it can do some incredible things. The problem is that the learning curve is so incredibly steep that most people are going to be too intimidated to try to use it.

There are several menus listing available shapes, tools and colors, and I had a hard time figuring out what to do with them. The manual that came with the game is more like a textbook, which made using the editor more of an assignment than a fun activity. There are some preloaded objects for each class, like sharks to attack your ship, or bunnies as enemies, which you can use as templates, but I couldn’t find an easy way to manipulate them. An interactive tutorial would have changed my attitude completely. I felt the need to remind the game that I’m a player, not a designer, and if it wanted me to embrace this career change, I was going to need more hand holding than it offered.

Gameplay: My thoughts on the gameplay come from a very “middle of the road” POV. With Blast Works, you either fall on one side of the fence or the other. This is a game in which you get out exactly what you put in, which is either an extreme positive or an extreme negative, depending on your view.

If you’re a diligent, uber-creative person who loves the idea of supreme customization, you’re going to love this game. The campaign and arcade modes are more like tutorials than actual gameplay. The “game” isn’t the one included on the disk; it’s the one the user creates—the protagonist, antagonists, the setting and even the bullets. You can build almost any scenario with enough time and patience. Would you like to see the starship USS Enterprise take on a fleet of flying Stay Puft Marshmallow Men in a supermarket? No problem.

So really, the game is fun not because of the mechanics—flying from one side of the screen to the other, shooting ships, collecting their debris and dodging—but because of variations you can create on that simple theme. It’s a great idea in theory, but in practice I found it incredibly boring and tedious; no matter how different the shapes look, it’s the still same darn game. I question how many times I can fly side to side before watching the dog scratch himself offers me more non-repetitive amusement.

Multiplayer: Historically, side scrolling/flying shooters such as this are great to attack with a friend or two, but the strategy and gameplay of Blast Works goes against this idea. Your ship’s ever-increasing size and firepower help you to tear through each level, but when you throw an ally into the mix, and you both begin collecting debris, it soon becomes impossible to discern where your ship ends and your friend’s begins. It’s too jumbled, even with only two people, to make it really fun.

Sound FX: When the game started the first time and I heard the synthetic voice intone “Blast Works Build Trade Destroy,” I anticipated an array of digital quasi-cheesy sound effects. I was sadly disappointed to discover that almost all of the sounds are seemingly identical. Every bullet has the same noise. When a ship explodes, it always makes the same light, breaking sound. I was very surprised that, for a game offering so much diversity with its visuals, its audio component was so limited and trite.

Music: The music of Blast Works is entirely what you’d expect: 8-bit light and repetitious digital ballads. They are pieces that simply hang around in the background as you fly from side to side, barely recognizable but good enough to set a nice cruising mood.

Intelligence: Blast Works has no true adaptive intelligence, and that’s a good thing. It’s very much akin to classic arcade titles in which you play a memory game; recalling the patterns of all of the enemies is to your advantage. In the editor, you can set these patterns, in flight paths and even bullet trajectories. So if you want to have your foes attack in a graceful figure-eight pattern with bullets that zig-zag across the screen, that’s what you can make them do.

Difficulty: Looking at the game as two different entities, a side-scroller and a game editor, I’m forced to give low marks to each. The game editor, while full-featured, is far too intimidating for the average user, and the campaign and arcade modes actually seem a little too challenging. In most games of this genre, with enough skill you can fly through patterns of bullets and survive, but in Blast Works, the ability to build “shields” and extra weapons from the remains of downed ships adds an extra layer of difficulty. Should a stray bullet destroy your ship near the end of a level (when play typically becomes more challenging) or during a boss fight, you spawn with no extra pieces or weaponry, and it’s very hard to stay alive. In a typical game, I’d get all the way to the end of a level before being destroyed, then lose all my remaining lives in a matter of few seconds because I’d reappear almost defenseless in a barrage of incoming fire.

Overall: I was originally hyped for Blast Works, but I ended up disappointed. Replayability is hampered by the Wii’s online capabilities. I logged in three times to download or share content, but there was nothing available. This is a big problem, since building a stage or a ship from scratch is so time-consuming; a player who takes the time to learn to use the game editor and creates original content is likely to only do it once. At the end of the day, Blast Works is a great idea, and one game makers should further develop, but it’s not yet diverse enough warrant owning it.