Blow It Up described itself as a ‘physics destruction game’, and that put a grin on my face. The destruction part for an obvious reason. Everyone needs a little bit of destruction in their lives every now and then. But the ‘physics’ part did its fair share too. When I see a physics based game, I imagine knocking out the lowest block of a tower and watching everything collapse into tiny bits. It’s one of those pleasures in life that you’re really not sure you should be enjoying.
So the fact that Blow It Up features bombs as the central mechanic was the cherry on top. Before we dig into that though, there is an elephant in the room that we need to address. Blow It Up is very similar, in gameplay, to Angry Birds. I suspect that’s an unavoidable comparison. It’s no bad thing though. Angry Birds provided a winning formula. Despite a small amount of physics wonkiness, Blow It Up is undeniably fun.
Dropping Bombs
The basic format is nice and simple. You stroll your anthropomorphic bomb character over to a level on the hub, and you’re greeted with a stack of wood, concrete and enemy bombs. On the left is your, presumably, more heroic bomb. You drag with the mouse to indicate its trajectory and let it fly. If you’ve set your trajectory correctly, the concrete and wooden towers will collapse into screaming bits. It’s good fun. Launching a bomb on the perfect trajectory is wonderfully rewarded by the physics engine showing all the individual sections of the towers collapse.
It’s a simple pleasure, but to Blow It Up‘s credit, it works hard to keep things fresh. There’s a decent selection of bombs, for instance, which all have different skills. Your basic one will accelerate when clicked, but by the end you’re carpet bombing areas with the airship or splitting into cluster bombs. My personal favourite was the gun bomb, which would freeze and just start shooting its way through the architecture. What’s more, the levels are sensibly designed. Certain structures can’t be destroyed, for instance, requiring crafty use of all the bombs. There wasn’t a single type that was left unused.
Wibbly-Wobbly
Let’s talk a bit more about Blow It Up’s physics. It’s voxel based. What this means is that everything is built from three-dimensional pixel-equivalents called voxels, each of which are affected by the physics engine. So when a bomb collides with a wall, it’ll blast apart into pieces. This makes for good collapses, but it is a little wonky at times. Towers will often be left standing on just one skinny leg, for instance. The 3D nature backfires a bit too. There were a couple of times when enemy bombs would be knocked into the foreground, so that none of my bombs could touch them. A bit frustrating.
Still, when it works, it works very well. I had a couple of levels where I launched a single, well-placed bomb and sat back as everything began to slowly fall apart in the perfect domino effect. Beautiful. That said, the decision to use voxels does hurt the visuals a bit. The blocky style looks a bit ugly, in my opinion, and it’s lacking some personality. The enemy bombs, and the levels in general, look a touch bland. It’s not a deal-breaker but, without wishing to directly drag up the comparison again, I don’t think anyone is going to make the Blow It Up Movie.
Blow It Up – Good Messy Fun
It’s not really what we’re here for though, is it? We’re here for the gameplay, and that is undeniably fun. Blow It Up isn’t a long game, clocking in at about two and a half hours for the campaign, but there are some elements that’ll keep people coming back. Levels function on a bronze-silver-gold scoring system, for example. Most importantly, however, it lets you create levels and upload them to the Steam workshop. There’s not too many there yet, but I played a couple of interesting ones. One emulated the Death Star’s exhaust port. I want to come back to it once a few creative types have pushed it to the limit.
Once again, I come back to where I started: it’s fun to throw explosives at buildings and watch them all fall down. The voxel system makes the collapses a bit more realistic, even if it can get a bit wonky at times. That’s a risk of every physics engine, though. Blow It Up may not stick around for long, but if you’re in the mood to watch something collapse into tiny bits, then it’ll more than scratch that itch.
