Boom Box Blue! (PC)

Thank you VaragtP for sending us this game to review!

In Boom Box Blue! your goal is to collect as many stars, bombs, and power-ups as you can without touching the enemy blocks falling from the sky. In order to prevent the blocks from taking over the game area, you’ll have to drop bombs on them. The enemy blocks come in all different shapes and sizes, but they all blow up the same.

As you collect stars and upgrade your character, you can spend upgrade points on increasing your health points, bomb blast radius, number of bombs to carry and the rate of dropping stars. Maxing out the health points and bomb carrying capacity helps you last longer in the game. Falling hamburgers can replenish a health point, but will cause your character to grow, and as it gets bigger, it will be harder to avoid enemy contact. You can counteract the growth side effect if you vomit out the hamburger within seconds of swallowing it. Conversely, mushrooms will cause your character to shrink slightly. Thankfully, the smaller state does not impact the number of bombs you can carry. The last power-up is an hourglass which slows down time temporarily.

To keep the gameplay interesting several random effects will trigger. For example, the night mode will significantly reduce visibility. When the wind blows, the enemy blocks will get whisked from one side of the screen to the other. Dodging them becomes trickier as they travel outside of their normal falling patterns. The last random limitation I noticed was a reduction in the food items dropped. Outside of that effect, the drop rate for all items is pretty ample.

The gameplay is relatively simple, but fun. It doesn’t take long to max out the levels of the blue box you control and I managed to unlock all thirty-five Steam achievements in an hour. If you’re looking for a cheap and easy game to unlock Steam achievements in, Boom Box Blue! has you covered.

Graphically, this title is rather simple and it did not fully utilize my widescreen display. I assumed that this game was a mobile port, but I couldn't find it on the mobile market place anywhere. The interface isn’t hard to use, but you can only exit the game from the main menu. If you go into the upgrades section, you can only replay the level and cannot go back to the main menu to exit the game.

The sound effects are cute and get the job done. The background music is decent but there is only one song. More variety would have been nice here. Adding more background music would have increased the game’s meager 10MB install size though.

In the end Boom Box Blue! is a simple game that is fun, but can be maxed out in an hour’s time. The asking price is a reasonable ninety-nine cents so I can’t complain too much there. It’s now one of my eight perfect Steam games so that’s a nice boost to my profile too.