After four Indiana Jones movies, is anyone surprised that Steven Spielberg's first Wii game already has a sequel?
Boom Blox Bash Party, released last week, is the follow-up to last year's unlikely Spielberg-helmed hit game, Boom Blox. The physics-based puzzle game won over critics with its charm, masterful use of the Wii's motion controls, and appeal across the casual/hard-core divide.
The short-order sequel delivers more of what we loved and less of what we didn't, tacking on loads of new ways to have fun with physics and destruction. But the best part is Bash Party's new, nearly hassle-free level-sharing feature. It lets gamers create their own levels and share them online with the rest of the world, meaning that the bash party is never over.
As in the original Boom Blox, you'll work your way through a lengthy series of puzzles that deal with physics. You might need to smash a tower of blocks by throwing baseballs with the Wiimote, or gently tug blocks out of a tower without toppling it over.
To make things more interesting, Bash Party adds different environments that change the game's fundamental physics. Some levels take place in space or underwater, requiring you to put extra thought into how objects will move around before you start throwing them.
If you're looking for something a bit more action-oriented, you'll enjoy the stages that arm you with cannons or laser pistols, then task you with shooting at gems while fighting off foes — like flying saucers or manic monkeys armed with baseballs — that threaten your delicate structures.
As you play, you're constantly rewarded for your efforts: You'll earn medals and Boom Bux (the game's currency) for completing levels, Achievement awards for completing certain goals and a number of unlockable tools and bricks that you can use in Bash Party's level editor.
For such a cheery-looking game, the difficulty escalates fairly quickly. Earning Bronze and Silver medals for each level isn't too tough, but snagging Gold medals often demands incredible skill and/or blind luck. If you'd rather not beat every single level, you can always spend a few Boom Bux to unlock content that would otherwise be hidden behind difficult challenges.
Bash Party offers both cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes. Versus mode might see you blasting apart your friends' structures and relieving them of their gems, while co-op encourages players to work together, taking turns constructing elaborate towers or dismantling them as a team under strict time limits.
The revamped level editor gives players the ability create levels from scratch or modify existing levels to suit their needs. Sharing levels is easier, too: You don't need to enter Nintendo's onerous "friend codes" to share levels with other people. Electronic Arts moderates the levels for inappropriate content and shares approved ones with every gamer.
While EA populated the game with more than 400 puzzles, chances are you won't find enough of the ones you like best. But fear not: There's a delightfully simple option for finding more. On each set of levels, just click "download more" and Bash Party will search the servers for levels with rule sets similar to the one you're playing.
To search more broadly, you can go to the game's Download menu and choose between Solo, Cooperative and Versus levels, or a Freestyle section chock-full of user creations that lack rules and are just for fun. You can edit any level that you download and re-upload your edited version, although the game will always keep track of the original creator, giving credit where it's due.
But while it's easy to find more levels, getting exactly what you want can be a chore. There's no option to simply browse through groups of levels, and the search function could be much more useful. Typing "bomb" or "explosion" won't find all the levels that have bombs in them — just the few that actually include those specific words in their title or brief description.
Until more intrepid users start loading their descriptions with search terms, good luck trying to track down quirky new Rube Goldberg machines or some of the more whimsical creations that the first game had to offer.
As with most puzzle game sequels, this return to Boom Blox doesn't attempt to reinvent the wheel. Many of the origina's flaws are still here, from hyper-realistic physics models that don't work the way you planned to those tedious multiplayer levels where you're forced to knock every last block off the stage.
On the whole, though, Boom Blox Bash Party is still a challenging and fun experience, bolstered by a potentially limitless supply of user-generated content to keep the game fresh.
__WIRED __Great for both casual and hard-core gamers, easy-to-download levels
__ TIRED __Blind luck often trumps skill, weak content-search tools
$40, Electronic Arts
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