Adorable alien rubber bands star in a physics-based puzzle platformer. What's not to love? Well, we could name a few things... but overall, Boingz looks like a solid WiiWare title. Hit the jump for our impressions.
Boingz, the latest effort from Band of Bugs and Outpost Kaloki developer NinjaBee, made headlines Friday for being publisher RealNetworks' first foray into WiiWare. Today, we're here to tell you that Boingz is more than a statement of intent; it's a pretty decent game as well.
Built from the ground up for Wii around the single concept of flicking a rubber band -- "It's fun to grab and stretch and pull," says producer Frank Rogan -- the title is a 2.5D platformer featuring red, blue and green aliens who are just that: rubber bands with antennae, eyes and legs.
Using the Nunchuk analog to walk and steer, and the Wiimote pointer to select and drag, players grab, pull, aim and release the antenna of a Boingz to launch it across gaps and over cliffs in an attempt to find its sleeping friends, wake them up, and direct them all to their color-coded teleporters to move on to the next stage -- while lifting gates, riding elevators and collecting crystals (called Twinklies) along the way.
Though each Boingz has finite weight, jumping ability and a propensity to float in water -- all of which stand in the way of completing the game's various physics-based puzzles -- you can temporarily offset these weaknesses by attaching Boingz to nearby objects (or one another) with a push pin.
(No Boingz were harmed in the making of this screenshot.)
With clever manipulation of Boingz, bridges, catapults and diving belts can all be improvised, and most every level likely has a number of correct solutions. What I found frustrating, though, was that many seemingly obvious solutions just didn't work. Though elastic, we couldn't use Boingz stretched over a gap as trampolines; though stretchable to some distance, we got no flight range bonus when we realistically stretched them over an edge (as in images above) as opposed to simply pulling through the ground beneath their feet. Once airborne, controlling where the floaty Boingz landed was tricky, and the attach point for the push pin ability was incredibly touchy in the build we tried.
Lastly, we were told that in some levels, the game's super jump power-up -- conferred upon ones Boingz after collecting every Twinklie in the level -- was absolutely required. Not exactly an open-ended gameplay experience, that.
It's probably all tweakable, but after falling to the very bottom of the level for the umpteenth time while attempting the 'official' solution to level 12, I became a little frustrated.
I have to give NinjaBee credit for keeping me playing that long, though. There's something inherently hilarious about watching a humanoid rubberband fly end over end, its beady little eyes blinking, that tempers even the most frustrating fall.
At 30 levels, approximately 27MB in size and at a price of 1000 Wii Points, Boingz will be available "soon." We like what we see, but at that price NinjaBee will have to grab, stretch and pull a few more things into place to receive our full recommendation.
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October 7th, 2008 at 5:30 am
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