OddBlob is a pretty appropriate title for this quirky little game. You play the titular character, a cute purple blob with arms and big buggy eyes. Your job is to get from one end of each level to the other, chomping food along the way and avoiding pits that will cause you to tumble to your doom. I have to confess that I was not a big fan of this game at first. As I played it more for the purpose of writing this review, however, OddBlob really began to endear itself to me. While there’s nothing mind blowing about the game, it has a certain charm that will keep you coming back for more.
Lots Of Choices
As OddBlob your mission in life is simply to get from the area of stars where you start to the area of stars at the other end of each level. Along the way there are various fruits and other items of food you can eat, but none of those are essential to your survival. There are also hearts you can snag, and those are good because they give you an extra life. There are also clocks you can pick up, and I think what those do is give you some extra time before the level starts crumbling behind you. Finally there are pieces of cake, and if you happen to snag one of those you’ll get to a bonus level. On the bonus level you get one move to try and reach another piece of cake. If you do you get a bonus, and either way you then get dumped back to your regularly scheduled game.
Your main obstacles are pits that cause you to fall to your death and walls that block your passage. You can get around both of these things with well placed jumps, but be sure that you’re jumping over or away from them, and not into them! The final problem is that the level is slowly crumbling away behind you, which you won’t notice right away but will become painfully obvious after a while, especially if you’re playing on the highest difficulty level. Just make sure you keep moving forward at a brisk pace, and you shouldn’t fall away like the fabled Atlantis.
To help – or potentially hinder – your progress, several of the tiles have springs on them in the form of arrows and circles. Arrows launch you in the direction the arrow is pointing, and you’ll travel either one or two tiles depending on if the arrow is single or double. Once an arrow is used it goes away and the tile becomes ordinary. Circles keep you moving in the same direction as you were traveling when you landed on them, and once again either boost you one or two tiles depending on if there are one or two circles. Unlike arrows, circles do not go away. The fun part of “spring” tiles is when you land on one that catapults you into another… then another… The down side, however, is when the last catapult sends you into a pit. That’s never a good thing.
The game has two modes of play (though I haven’t really figured out the difference between them yet), and there are score boards for both modes. In addition there are several OpenFeint achievements, and there’s an in-game menu to see them (called Awards) so that you don’t actually have to go into OpenFeint. One thing I like about the awards in this game is that for the ones where you have to collect so many of something, they actually tell you how many you’ve collected. Progress meters are nice.
Visually this feels like the spiritual successor to Platypus. The objects are all rendered from clay, and even though it doesn’t necessarily produce the crispest, most detailed sprites, there’s something about the look of clay that can’t be beat. The blob is well animated, though the rest of the game is lacking in that department. Still, I love the look and it’s a nice change of pace from cartoony or doodle-like. The sound is okay, but the best part of it, which is the noises the blob makes, is highly underused. The music is actually pretty good, and it reminds me of a cross between two things, but I just can’t quite place what those two things are.
I’m not going to tell you there’s a whole lot going on here either revolutionary or even evolutionary, because there’s not. What I will say, however, is that this is a solid game with simple mechanics that becomes quite challenging when you try to determine the course that will give you the most points as the level goes crumbling away behind you. And yes, I took about 3 breaths during that last sentence! Anyway, OddBlob is a great time waster with a cute character and plenty of clay food to munch on. It’s also a universal application, and as of this writing it’s only 99 cents, so you win all around.
Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link
of course like your web-site but you need to check the spelling on quite a few of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very troublesome to inform the truth however I’ll certainly come back again.