778th played so far

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Wii
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Amblin Entertainment/EA Los Angeles
Publisher:Electronic Arts

The Wii is, or was, a popular platform for puzzle games. In part, the controllers allow for a different experience that can tie into the genre well, but the system is also a big hit with the casual audience who usually enjoy them a lot. Boom Blox Bash Party seems to combine them both, as a game where you bash blocks into each other to solve these problems.

Our Thoughts

With a puzzle game like this, it’s the variation that can matter a lot. Games like Lumines can draw on escalation as the game goes on, but Chime‘s time limit creates pressure while something like Planet Puzzle League can start to falter a bit after a while. The difficulty goes up but it doesn’t necessarily work as well in a long term set up.

Boom Blox Bash Party goes for variety. It all revolves around the physics systems, throwing things against blocks that fall over. The blocks behave in different ways – some exploding on impact, others falling with different weights, and some disappearing match three style. When they fall on the floor or other things happen, they give you points, but with the different types of blocks and levels, they manage to create different distinct game modes. Toppling, explosions and other projectiles account for a part of that as well. It all ties into the Wii controls as well, the motion controls helping the system feel really nice.

And if that’s not enough, you can make your own levels. You can’t share them online anymore, but there’s a lot of options that would have created more of this variety. You need to unlock a bunch of features one by one, but it’s a nice extra feature. After all, Mario Maker was based on that principle alone.

There’s not much of a story to the game – you’re going through a circus and seeing different performers do their thing inside. It doesn’t really make that much sense, but the block creatures are nice touches and it’s nice to see them interact with each other and comment on your performance. It’s a cute style, not too complex, but it adds a lot of personality to the game.

Final Thoughts

Boom Blox Bash Party is a puzzle game that does more with its concepts than a lot of others and has a nice fun setting around it. I really enjoyed playing it and while it gets more difficult soon enough, there’s so much to do in the game that it never really matters much.