When it comes to puzzle games, they often tend to feel familiar to one another. A few different varieties tend to emerge, such as navigating passages, matching colors or filling up rows as pieces fall from above. Raining Blobs is a familiar, lightweight experience that is fun in small doses, but does not provide enough content to keep me coming back for more.
I can happily say that I enjoy my time with Raining Blobs. Short bursts of fast paced blob-dropping action works well in measured bursts. Similar to Super Puzzle Fighter II HD Remix, colors smush together from smaller blobs to form larger ones that you can then clear out with the right drops - blobs with stars in them. You are competing against at least one (often more) other girls controlled by either the AI or human opponents and the goal of the game is to push your opponent to the tops of their screens Tetris-style. This works best if you can pull off large clears that pile up more blobs on your opponent's screen.
Having played this game briefly a while ago, I can say that the recent update makes the game even better. It is still a pretty sparse affair, with only a few different modes of play, a minimal story and graphics and music that while charming, are also pretty basic. Raining Blobs is all about the gameplay, and to that end it is a fun game, especially if you are playing against other people. The leaderboards and achievements serve as nice carrots dangled in front of the player to keep you coming back for more. It also helps that the gameplay sessions tend to be fast and furious affairs that do not require a lot of your time per match.
The good news is that fans of the puzzle genre should be able to pick right up and play. Movement of the falling blobs works exactly as you would expect as you slide them left, right and down. You use buttons to spin them clockwise and counter-clockwise. There is even that familiar hesitation where contact can be made (at least at lower levels before the game's speed picks up on you) with blobs already on the ground, and you can sometimes spin your descending blobs and try to slip them into narrow spaces in a last-ditch effort.
Visually, the game's gimmick revolves are cute little anime girls that... well, do not really do much. They serve as the wallpaper to your window, which is resting in front of a pixelated (often nature-based) background. Smaller sprited versions of the girls will cry or celebrate when the match ends, but it does not go much further than that. I have to admit I was a little disappointed in the lack of overall animations. Even with Super Puzzle Fighter II HD Remix you had the cartoony characters animating often to hilarious effect off to the sides. Here you get some flashy tinted overlays, but it feels like a missed opportunity not to have multiple images of the girls that maybe change based on how the game itself is going. Whether you have a warning on your screen because you are about to lose or are dominating, the girls stay still and fail to do anything interesting at all.
The biggest problem is that there just is not a lot here to do. The story mode is incredibly basic, with a different ending for each girl in the Tournament mode, but it just amounts to different strings of text and nothing of substance. There are not a lot of modes here either, so you are left to mostly try to work your way up leaderboards or to take on groups of players simply for the competitive spirit of it all.
With a lackluster overall presentation, bare story and lack of modes, the end result is a fun distraction for about fifteen minutes at a time, but a game that is far too easy to put down and walk away from as well. No doubt puzzle fans will enjoy it, but I still prefer the much older Super Puzzle Fighter II HD Remix even though it is a much older game. Raining Blobs is not bad by any means, but it just does not do enough to separate itself from the rest of the action/puzzle genre.
Game Information
PC
Developer(s):
Endi Milojkoski
Publisher(s):
Black Shell Media
Genre(s):
Strategy
Puzzle
Mode(s):
Single Player
Multiplayer
Other Platform(s):
None
Article by Chris H.
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