Game review: Mutant Blobs Attack

Having beaten Uncharted: Golden Abyss on every mode except for crushing, I decided to look at some of the lower priced PS Vita games until I can find free time to get to Fnac for my next game card. (I'm waffling between Shinobido 2 or F1 2011.) My first choice was Super Stardust Delta, but after seeing so many great reviews for Mutant Blobs Attack, I figured that might be good for a laugh. In fact, it's not good for ANY laughs, or much of anything else, either.

The premise sounds interesting: a "Humane Blob Torture Museum" is host to a bunch of blobs that the humans made as a result of torturing one blob who crash landed on Earth. (This being a sequel to a PS3 game, I'm guessing the spiky main character is the descendant of the first blob.) This torture makes the main mutant blob angry enough to arrange for an escape, and so our game begins. But, thereafter nothing about this game makes much sense, and not in a cute cartoon kind of way. No, it's more like an "incomplete project from a kid snorting too many Pixie Stix" kind of way.

Before I start bitching, I'll mention what I liked. Before they're shrunken and impossible to see, the humans moving around in the early levels used a cute and simple animation style. I also liked how the outer edges of the screen are made grimy and reflective, like you're watching all of this on an old tube TV. And, as I said to the artist of the game on Twitter, the art used for the humans and the backgrounds is nice in an old cartoons kind of way.

But despite the art and music trying to capture old campy feelings from a long-gone era, the level designs are absurdly and haphazardly assembled without taking advantage of the new concepts the game makers are introducing to the familiar attacking blob trope. It doesn't help that the blob's half lidded eye conveys a sense of boredom more than anger. He looks bored going through every level, and in this regard, I was able to identify with him well enough. Right from level one, I was bored too.

While most space blobs shown in the intro seemed resilient to all forms of torture, the blob I'm playing is slow, hard to control, and frail. So pretty much everything can kill it, and probably has a few dozen times. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if levels weren't designed to make every move a life or death decision. Which would kinda make sense if our blob was trapped in the bowels of a lab still desperately trying to contain the "hero." But the blob easily escaped the scientists' clutches by hiding in a student's bag, and his course begins in a mundane college dorm.

And yet, there's lasers in the dorm living room; floor-to-ceiling lasers that force you to rush through the room or be insta-killed. (Yet don't set fire to all the trash lying around, or burn the carpets…or the people.) There's moving lasers in the air conditioning ducts, lasers in the plumbing, and lasers on the "football training field". There's even a blob-seeking laser. Clearly, the men behind this game are fond of lasers, whether they fit a location or not. Or, maybe they didn't have any other ideas for what could harm a blob and just kept tossing out the same crap answer over, and over, and over and… I mean, heaven forbid they should make it go through a walk in freezer (a known problem spot for ALL space blobs) and perhaps avoid ice cubes or touching the frozen metal floor. Nope, just lasers, lasers, and more lasers.

And for those of you who don't like lasers, there's glowing spikes! In an early level, these are arrayed in tandem with a dozen heated vents all placed side-by-side to blow the blob up into said spikes…which are mounted under a coffee table. Because lots of people have death traps set up in their college dorms under their coffee tables, right? (I never went to college, so maybe I'm wrong on this.)

The game's main theme of growth isn't conveyed very well from one level to the next either. But then again, none of the objects you're supposed to eat are made to proper scale. There's baseballs and apples that should be on the same scale as the humans and surrounding books and pizza boxes, but are as tiny as six-sided dice. The plastic drinking cups and coffee mugs are also the size of dice. No self-respecting frat boy is going to chug beer from these thimbles. Meanwhile, hamburgers and milk jugs in later levels are the same size as people and garbage bags.

Even if you ignore these scale problems and just focus on the blob, his starting size doesn't make sense. When the intro plays, the blob is shown to already be bigger than a human hand. Yet in level one, you're smaller than a mouse. Why? Because. And the blob will constantly shrink between levels without any rational explanation. The blob must grow large enough to absorb corks to enter new levels after eating enough to grow, but after munching some tanks and helicopters on Earth, the blob's dimensions shrink in the ship so that astronauts are close to the size of the blob all over again. So even your method of measuring progress, your size, is meaningless from one level to the next. Why? Come on, just guess this time.

And let's talk about those level "corks." I've seen dumb ideas work in old cartoons, but this is one dumb idea that gets worse as it goes along. It starts off stupid because you have to eat a cork from inside a toilet in level two. Yes, because people normally stopper their toilets between uses. A stopper in the sink, I'll buy. A stopper in the side of a warehouse wall? No, I can't take enough stupid pills for this to work.

Once you make it past the dorm interior, the number of moving laser traps meant to kill the blob grows, and none of them makes any sense for the scenes the game background is trying to depict. Why are there rows of lasers near a barbecue pit in a public park? Because. A home the blob must enter has guided missile turrets. Sure, that's standard issue for home security, I guess. Why couldn't the game makers come up with some challenges that didn't involve lasers, spikes, or missiles? Because.

After a few levels to get used to triangle jumping on a delay, the blob picks up the power to manipulate certain objects, which you move using the touch screen. What a tragic waste of the touch screen for this stupid gimmick. Just like the traps, nothing about the items you use makes sense. The blob will use some levers to move food around a warehouse, (Why? Because.) or to launch yourself over a field of glowing spikes. (Again, a field of deadly traps…in a public park.) Or you move some barriers to act as platforms or shields. But as to why these moveable objects are mounted there in the first place, there is no reason to have them. They're just extra doo-dads and widgets with no use in the world except to aid the blob.

The blob gets magnetic powers, but only certain metals are magnetic, and most pipes are designed so that you will land on glowing spikes on either side of the pipe you needed to land on. Or veer into the path of a conveniently placed laser. Why? You know the answer by now.

Every level is just thrown together like this, with no rhyme or reason to the designs, except to be "challenging." Food might be hidden in some strange locations, or you might find one of the blob's "friends." (Even though there shouldn't be any blobs on the moon from the lab. Or on the rocket itself, now that I think about it. (The blob eats its friends too, so I guess he's getting back old parts of himself.)) But in trying so hard to challenge players, it seems no thought was given to whether or not the levels were designed well, or were at least fun to play. And the pull of the "funny ads" that many other reviewers mentioned aren't funny. They're tired memes that were old jokes 6 and 7 years ago. The signs might as well ask, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" because that's the banal level of humor used throughout the "punny" ad theme.

I got up to the rocket ship going to the moon, and after pushing through some really badly drawn "pipes" (The whole foreground is rendered a flat black that hides the prettier background art and looks like a five-year old attempting to draw a rocket interior) and "gears" (which don't mesh up like proper gears, or serve any purpose except to crush the blob over and over) I was presented with a maze where everything had a laser mounted on it. My every effort to move past was thwarted, and the game's "tip" is to engage rockets and "flatten" my blob against the wall. Instead, the rocket makes steeing the blob nigh-impossible. So instead of clinging close to the wall while being killed with a laser, I flew wildly through the lasers until I died. Oh yeas, that's so much better. And I assume that if I stick with this and make it past ANOTHER set of randomly placed lasers, there will be many more levels of this kind of "fun" to look forward to? Question: Why would I want to abuse myself for the sake of something that isn't fun, nor even mildly amusing?

Much Like Escape Plan, the premise sounds better than the actual game, and the attempts to use the Vita's new features are a pain in the ass. I have to wonder why some game makers confuse frustration for fun, or why there's so many people praising this for being a hard game while ignoring the fact that it's so repetitive and uninspired. It's my guess that some gamers are masochists, and that being killed over and over by the same kinds of traps is fun, in any context. So because they view the game as hard, they see it as "fun." I just find it tedious, and I have better ways to waste my time. Other video games, for instance. But not this one.

Lets' see, what else? There's no setting the game level from easy to hard. There's just one setting, "fuck off and die." There's no way to change the button controls, despite there being a controls button in the options. (It just tells you which buttons do what.) There's no restart level button, so if you flub a section and pass your consumable friends without munching them, you have to quit the game, wait to load the main page, and then go back through all the menus to restart the level. Since so many levels are this poorly made, I would like to see a level skip button in a future update, like Escape Plan had. So then I could at least attempt playing the levels that weren't clones of Laser-rama: The Revenge.

There's a common trend of the billboard ads in the backgrounds ripping off internet memes and using them in "punny tributes." There's nothing of a tribute in this, and much like the rest of the game, there's not much thought put into the humor. Even though I knew all the memes, there was no sense of fun at discovering the new ads. I also love puns, but none of these were worthy of a laugh or a groan. They're tired, like someone trying to tell an arrow to the knee joke even though everyone's already told them, "that joke isn't funny."

I need to note, it's not the difficulty of the game annoying me. I'm getting my ass handed to me in Super Stardust Delta, and I'm loving it even if it's hard. I love that game because the game play is so addicting, and all of the elements make sense, even if they are equally nonsensical. I'm not really stuck in the game just yet, but I don't care enough about this ball of spiked snot with no personality to keep trying.

Mutant Blobs Attack looks like it might have had a personality, with a little more effort and play testing. Instead, it tries to fake being interesting by cribbing internet memes and throwing the blob into ever more convoluted laser/glowy spike scenarios to escape from.

So, let me recap: sloppy controls, uninspired level design with dully repetitive threats, and a "borrowed" sense of humor that isn't funny. If this were a first effort from a high school computer literacy student, I might find something nice to say like "Good first effort." But this is a game designed by Drinkbox, who supposedly have several successful games in their portfolio already. That's what makes this game so sad to me. It's coming from pros, but looks like it came out of a failed school project. If this were a freebie I downloaded as a sample, I wouldn't even bother with a review. But I paid for this crap, and I feel ripped off.

I give Mutant Blobs Attack 1 star, and much like Escape Plan, I can't delete it fast enough to make room on my memory card for better games. A waste of money and time, I can only hope the next generation of Vita mini games have more thought put into them. Cause otherwise, I'm going to be pissed if I have to keep wasting money on half baked designs and last year's worst jokes.