Publisher: THQ
Developer: Blue Tongue
System: Wii
Genre: 3D Platformer
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

At its big E3 press conference in July, Nintendo cancelled Christmas. At least, that’s the way it felt to the legions of fanboys (myself included) who looked to the Big N’s annual briefing for news of the game that would be keeping us warm once the leaves started to fall and the holidays arrived. With no new IPs or return engagements from the back catalog of marquee mascots announced, Wii owners looked with dismay at the cold days ahead. And then, an unlikely hero arrived to brighten this winter of our discontent. A true Cinderella man, de Blob is in de house, and he might just be de cure for what ails us.

Blue Tongue’s de Blob grew out of a college game-design project. The developers realized they were onto something with their unique mash-up of the quirky gameplay mechanics found in Katamari Damacy and the genre-bending platforming perfected in Super Mario Galaxy. Backed by publisher THQ, the group was given a chance to perfect its concept and develop a full-fledged action-platformer. De Blob was engineered from the ground up to play to the Wii’s strengths, providing one of the few third-party games that looks and plays as well as Nintendo’s traditional home-brew efforts.

De Blob puts you in control of a blob that has the ability to absorb color. At the start, the blob’s world has been overrun by an army of aliens bent on draining its hometown of color. It’s up to your blob to maneuver through each monochromatic cityscape, completing tasks for the suppressed citizenry and resurrecting their once vibrant vistas.

The game is split up into 10 enormous levels (each containing several sub areas). You are charged with careening through the environments looking for paint to fill your color meter, and for surfaces to color. Once you change the blob’s surface color, any object it touches instantly receives a coat of paint, thus adding to the overall World Completion percentage. The blob also discovers special Challenge Markers offering different objectives that, once completed, add to your overall score and open up new areas of the map. Included is a series of collectibles hidden throughout the levels that can apply patterns to your color schemes, allowing you to redecorate the world in some truly funky tones.