Negative Gamer Review: Balloon Blocks (Xbox Live Indie Games)

After reviewing Chime a few weeks ago I’ve been in a bit of a puzzle game kick. Whenever I’m at a console I’m either playing Chime or Super Puzzle Fighter 2. When out and about I’m playing Tetris and Puzzle Quest. Earlier this week I downloaded Balloon Blocks, thanks to a code provided by developer Creative Cog Games.

What I hoped to play was a Tetris clone with bouncy physics to liven things up. Instead I sat down and played an overly-easy, boring mess of a puzzle title. Have I become burned out on puzzle games, or do I have a legitimately lame block-dropping game on my hands?

Yeah, It’s Legitimately Lame.

Believe me, it’s not like I went into this game actively trying to be bored. The actual mechanics sound pretty cool on paper: drop multicolored tetrominoes into the playfield to try and match three colors together. The caveat is that the blocks bounce off of each other much like, well, balloons. After landing, each block freezes, effectively stopping them from bouncing around. A bar at the top of the screen builds up as you get points. This allows you to unfreeze the placed blocks, which causes the blocks to compress and net you big points.

From the start Balloon Blocks is interesting for roughly 60 seconds. Then you unfreeze for the first time and realize there is no challenge whatsoever in the game. Unfreezing causes such a massive shift in the dynamics of the blocks that roughly 75% of the blocks you’ve placed are removed. This is either because they’ve matched up or blinked out of existence (more on that later). This massive point rush then fills up the unfreeze bar allowing you to play the second verse, same as the first.

What’s even worse is when you realize the entire game can be won by holding the left control stick down and pressing A. Holding down makes the tetrominoes land with such force they compress and either get eliminated normally, or dissolve through some strange programming irregularity. Pressing A activates the unfreeze. I seriously played ten minutes of the game on Hard setting, holding down the whole time and unfreezing periodically and didn’t come close to loosing.

Speaking of programming irregularities, this game is riddled with glitches. Instead of bouncing off of one another, blocks sometimes get stick inside of each other. I can’t count how many times I’ve matched three blocks to no result. Plus, slowdown is abundant once the play area starts to fill up to the top. The lag is miserable, people. Even if the game wasn’t so mind-numbingly simple, the glitches are just so odd and distracting.

The one glimmer of enjoyment comes from Custom mode. The game comes with multiple modes, from the usual single and multiplayer modes to Survival and Custom mode. In Custom mode you can alter everything about the game. What kinds of blocks are dropped, what the blocks do when they land, and the speed and size of the blocks are all determined by you. Plus there’s no godly Unfreeze ability; it’s just you and the blocks. Here the game starts to get moderately enjoyable, but only in small doses. Too long with this mode can still get excruciating.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• There is one other mode, Clear, that I didn’t have a lot of time with, but is just the main game with blocks already set in place. Not that exciting.
• The score is kept on an almost unreadable white-text-on-white-background sign. Yes, it is almost impossible to see.
• The background of the game is just simple blocks dropping. It looks like they’re falling into a fish tank or something. It’s exceptionally boring.
• I was frankly shocked when I saw the price tag of 240 MS points attached to this.

A great puzzle game should be, at it’s core, about strategy and challenge. Balloon Blocks has none of this though I can certainly see the merits of the balloon mechanics. I understand what Creative Cog Games was trying to go for here. I was also bored most of the time I spent with this title.

You might like this game if…

…puzzle games are usually too hard for you.

Final Score

A puzzle game that offers no real puzzle.

(What does this score mean?)