Glark

Quality Wii titles have been few and far between in my opinion. Wii Sports was great and a perfect pack-in to sell the system to the Wii’s new audience (that’s to say non-gamers for the most part). I wasn’t that into Super Mario Galaxy — great design but it just never grabbed me like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World did (bring on New Super Mario Bros. 2!) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl casts a very wide but very shallow net when it comes to gameplay.

I got my Wii back from loan to Kim and Jim and picked up Boom Blox today. Wow, this is a fun game. It’s all done up in cutesy-poo graphics but at its heart it is a game about destruction and demolition. If you ever built a lego castle as a kid just so you could destroy it then this is right up your alley. There’s a few different games including throwing for maximum carnage, throwing to create cascades, throwing to send blocks into point multipliers, a jenga-like tower game (with excellent physics) and even a castle siege mode that looks like it was inspired by one of my favourite childhood games Rampart (or if you ever played the lego-inspired Crossbows and Catapults in the 80s).

It makes excellent use of the Wiimote and of all the swingy-tossy games I played the control in Boom Blox feels the most ‘right’. My only real problem with the game is the crappy “Blast” modes which are just shooting mini-games and really could have (ok, let’s say shouldn’t) been on the disc. That said, Boom Blox is an excellent party game that can accommodate eight people in some modes. I’ve yet to play solo but I can easily recommend this on multiplayer alone.