Developer DrinkBoxStudios is hard at work on Mutant Blobs Attack, the group’s second game involving a blob and the first blob-related game that I know of for the PlayStation Vita. I stopped by the developer’s PAX booth and got lead into a back cargo room to check it out.
Players control a mutant blob moving through a town, jumping from place to place, and swallowing anything in its path — exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from the everyday, normal, mutant blob.
Upon starting up the game and selecting my level, the first thing I noticed was how good controlling the blob felt. When I performed a jump, I could feel the weight of the blob flying forward, causing me to miss a lot of jumps. In fact, the jump and movement of your character felt very similar to the way LocoRoco characters moved.
Gameplay is like the typical platformer in that players are moving from platform to platform, from A to B. Along the way, you will find sections where you cannot proceed until you get big enough to eat the cork stopping your progress. You get bigger by eating trees, green blocks, or even sometimes people. There are also plenty of areas to use your brain as you must move platforms to block laser beams.
Since this game is coming out on the PlayStation Vita, it uses some of its key features. However it is still a work in progress, so not all of the Vita functionality was present. I could use the front touch screen to move around platforms or to move the blob around when he went for a nice flight. This part was actually really cool as the blob would float in the air and I pressed the screen to the left of the blob to send him right, down to send him up. The biggest issue with this was that the back panel was not used yet for the motion controls, making it where my fingers often blocked my view of where I was headed, though the developers said they are still fine tuning everything. No motion controls or tilt were present in this build of the game, but that could change before release.
My time with this game was not very long, but it was enough to get a good feeling about the game. There are a lot of cool areas to add more of the Vita features, such as back touch and tilt, so it will be fun to see what the end product plays like. Even without those features though, Mutant Blobs Attack is looking to be a very fun platformer, come launch of the PlayStation Vita.
