Do your parents take away from you the joyous act of scribbling all over the walls with a crayon? Worry no longer, De Blob gives you the right to do it throughout an entire city, and your parents may even want to join in with this one.

De Blob is a game concept that has never before been attempted, and after you have played it for a while you will find yourself wondering, why has this not been tried in the past? The answer to that question is probably that the concept was just too simple to think of.

The storyline is intriguing. The city of Chroma City has been ransacked by the evil corporation of INKT under the command of Comrade Black who has ruthlessly sucked all the color from Chroma City and turned it into a vast, bland environment where nothing stands out - even the citizens of Chroma City, the Raydians, have had their colors banned. Blob, that’s you, has jumped on the bandwagon of a resistance group within the city known only as the Color Underground and their sole purpose is to bring color back to the streets of Chroma City and the Raydians once more.

You, the blob, are faced with the task of repainting the city. At the beginning of each level, you will actually have no color yourself - and must first  get your hands on some, or you would do if you had any hands. You collect your color from one of many paint bots that you will see roaming the streets of Chroma City - they are spider like creatures, carrying tanks of various colored paints on their backs which is where you need to grab your stock from. Once you have it, you must set about coloring an area of Chroma City to increase your color energy level. A certain color energy level must be reached to unlock the next level of the game. It sounds simple enough right? It is really, but you will be working against the clock which makes things a little more interesting.

Each section of the city will bring you new challenges to have a go at, each with their own unique goals which give the game a nice little side-show - without it, the overall appeal of the game could be tiring quite quickly, so these challenges are something of a saving grace. You may come across a race challenge, requiring you to reach a range of checkpoints within a set time limit. Most of these race challenges are easy enough, but you will occasionally come across checkpoints that are difficult to reach which will give you something of a struggle. On the other hand, you may be faced with a combat challenge which tasks you with tracking down and destroying certain INKT Corporation troopers, or INKT hardware situated somewhere in Chroma City. Last but not least, landmark challenges require you to take out certain buildings or structures in the city by hitting their weak spots, some of which are booby-trapped, so you will need to keep your wits about you.

The control system is easy to pickup, as you move the blob around the city using the Nunchuk thumb stick, and you jump by swinging your wii remote downwards. Rolling and jumping are what you’ll be doing the vast majority of the time, but the blob can also run along and spring off walls within the city which, if timed right, can bring great benefits to the gameplay. It can be a little tricky to master this technique but it’s certainly worth taking the time to learn it.

Needless to say the storyline is wafer thin, but it works so well that you honestly won’t notice or care at all. This storyline goes out of the window when you venture into the multiplayer game modes, though. Despite remaining in the background, the fun you have seeing up to three other blobs on screen competing with you to color the city will soon make you forget all of the behind the scenes stuff as you’ll be having too much fun to care. The multiplayer game modes available to you are Paint Match, Blob Race and Blob On The Run.

Paint Race allows you and your opponents to paint over one another’s colors, giving the game a frantic pace as you paint as much of the city as you can before dashing back to buildings your opponents have ’stolen’ from you to reclaim them as quickly as possible before time runs out. Blob Race is pretty much the same, only this time buildings can only be painted once - so you only need to work your way through the bland grey structures without worrying about those you have already painted being stolen from you. Blob On The Run is pretty much blob tag, with one paint-filled blob to begin with painting the city whilst the others attempt to tag it, and grab the ability to paint from them, and of course once you have the ability to paint you need to paint the city whilst avoiding being tagged by another blob.

Ultimately for me it is the multiplayer modes that give De Blob a valuable replayability factor, as it proves to be great fun time and time again, whereas the single player campaign, although very enjoyable, can get a little repetitive after some time. De Blob is a game that gamers of all ages can enjoy, and would make a great party game even though that isn’t the kind of audience developers Blue Tongue were probably hoping for, but with Christmas fast approaching this could be a money-spinning extra that weren’t counting on.

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