The Blocks Cometh – Review
Way back in 2011 Halfbot released the game “The Blocks Cometh” on IOS. It made Mashables list of top 10 games and scored 4 to 5 stars on almost every site that reviewed it. On top of that Halfbot is a developer that listens to their playerbase and have added requested features such as landscape gaming. Well now Android users can get in on this action a measly 3 years late. The fact it’s quite an old game could be part of the reason it has only got 100-500 installs in the first week in the Play Store.
So is this 3 year old IOS game worth paying £1.10 to “Noodlecake Studios Inc” I hear you ask? Short answer would be a definitive “yes”. That wouldn’t make much of a review though, so the longer answer is that Noodlecake port a lot of indie IOS games to Android and without them we wouldn’t have some of the best games in the play store. So keeping them going and encouraging indie devs to make games for Android is extremely important. What’s that I hear you scream at your screen “I don’t care about the ecosystem, £1.10 is too much money”. Well The Blocks Cometh is still a fun mini game in its own right. Think of it as a small man trying to survive inside a game of “Tetris” and you’re pretty much there. Some random disaster has happened and blocks are falling above you – quite what disaster would have caused this I don’t know, but there you go. The idea of the game is to keep jumping as high as possible until your inevitable death. With both achievements and leaderboards you will be willing to die over and over again just to unlock all 32 achievements and to keep on top of your friends list. In another way to keep things interesting you have 13 unlockable characters to play with, each with different attacks, speed and jump height. Some of these characters are from other indie games and even the odd e-famous person (I had to look some of them up, clearly a sign of getting old).
Game play is super simple you have left, right, jump and shoot. You use this to climb, jump and clear blocks so you can get as high as possible. That’s it, super simple and perfect for quick games on the go. The games 3* play modes are similar with only slight differences: “Classic” is for true gamers, no extra life and very much a ‘one hit and you’re out’ affair. “Casual” and “Arcade” both give you 3 hearts so you can take a bit of a beating, and as far as I can tell they are pretty much the same in most other ways as well. There is a 4th game mode but it will set you back £0.55p, and unless you have the nexus 9 don’t get this just yet. The controls for this mode are designed for 4:3 resolution and don’t sit right so it makes playing very hard. Once it’s updated it will be worth it. It’s the same game but as if you’re playing it on a Gameboy old school graphics and all. Even in its broken form it still made me smile. There is one more IAP, again for £0.55p you can buy the 9 original playable characters. This doesn’t really make much sense on Android as this is our first version of the game, but it may help to get that slightly higher score if you’re desperate. While I’m not a fan of IAP in a paid game these are vital to the game and are nice extras so I have no real problem with them being there.
If you have a spare £1.10 kicking around and are looking for a fun, quick mobile game this is for you. While challenging it’s not screen breakingly frustrating like flappy bird so may even save money in the long run. Replacing devices that have been hurled at walls can get expensive pretty quickly after all.
Still on the fence? Watch the below video.
