Color Bombs (Wii U) Review

Little blobs of colour move back and forth across the screen, bouncing of the sides and back towards the middle. The goal is to explode as many as these as possible. At the start of every level, a single solitary shot can be fired, and any blobs hit by it while it remains visible explode. Paint spatters where the blobs once were, and any subsequent blobs that run into them will also explode. The paint will disappear after a little while, and the goal here is to create as big of a chain reaction as its possible, and remove a preselected amount of blobs from each level only firing a single shot at the very beginning.

This might seem to lead to some sort of interesting puzzle mechanics, but the truth is it never does. There are sixty levels here in total, but, in reality, there is only one that gets replayed over and over. It never evolves beyond what is seen in the first level, even when the Color Bombs tries to switch things up. There are the normal levels, but then there are advanced and timed levels as well. Advanced levels introduce four little bumpers that all paint blobs bounce off of, while the timed levels give a fairly generous amount of time, but stop the chain reaction after that, even if there are splatters of paint that haven't disappeared yet.

These twists fail to add any new or interesting concepts to the gameplay, which might be because there was nothing to add them to in the first place. Furthermore, for every single level, all that needs to be done is mashing the fire button immediately, and watch and see if the level is eventually cleared. In fact, that whole "watching" thing is entirely optional, as whatever happens will happen regardless if anyone is paying attention to the screen or not. None of the levels are difficult, and there is no strategy needed because most stages will just sort of beat themselves.

Part of the issue is that it becomes impossible to predict exactly where the explosions will lead after the first handful, making any sort of planning entirely pointless - even if some sort of supercomputer was playing that could calculate the velocity and position of 70 different bouncing balls at the same time, it wouldn't be necessary because with so many blobs bouncing around it is almost impossible to lose in the first place. It all gets to the point where this doesn't even feel like a game. Turn on a movie so something interesting is happening in the background, mash "A" over and over, and there is a 99% chance this will be completed within half an hour. Any title that can be finished without looking at it while playing has a rather tenuous understanding of what a game is, and the people behind Color Bomb utterly failed in that regard.

There is also a bizarre difficulty curve here, where the only levels that will provide any challenge at all are really the first handful. They aren't actually hard, but the number of blobs bouncing around, slowly amps up, until there are 100 on the screen at the same time. Here, aiming blindly works wonders because there are so many that it becomes almost guaranteed to set off a chain reaction that clears almost the entire screen. With only 10, things are significantly less likely to work because there are only a few blobs to bounce around to cause that reaction in the first place.

It is just abysmal design, and it feels like the developer might not have even played this to realize that the difficulty has been set backwards. Of course, when there are 100 blobs on the screen and the chain reaction starts going, the actions slows to an absolute crawl because too much stuff is going on in the background. It feels like no time was spent in optimizing anything in any way, which isn't a surprise in the slightest when this whole thing looks and feels like it was put together in a single afternoon. This is just a mess from top to bottom, with no thought put into making this an enjoyable product in any way.