Doodle Blast!

Developer: Game Collage
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Graphics / Sound Rating:
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Overall Rating:

I'm a big advocate of the doodle movement. From Doodle Jump to Doodle Army, anything that looks hand drawn does it for me. Where does it stop though? Minimalist style is a fantastic concept, but amazing looks have to be paired with inspired gameplay to really be fantastic. That is where Doodle Jump succeeds, and where many of the others, such as Doodle Blast! don't.

As expected, Doodle Blast! is a fantastic looking Doodle Game. In fact, it may be the smoothest, most polished doodle game yet. The interface is rock solid, including the incredibly smooth and unexpectedly nice tutorial slides. Once you get into the game, you are treated with some fantastic hand drawn graphics that quickly evolve into insanity. There is stuff flying all round the screen, you have missiles shooting all over the place, enemies are coming at you from the air and the ground, and never does the game look like an incomprehensible mess. For the genre, the graphics may be as good as they can possibly get.

The issue with Doodle Blast! is that while the graphics never look like an incomprehensible mess, the gameplay quickly devolves into one. You start the game as a simple tank on a quest to get as far as you can while blowing up literally everything in your path. Trees, tanks, people, jets, helicopters… everything. Every once in awhile, a box will parachute down that you can tap on to upgrade your tank, eventually turning yourself into a tower of machine gun shooting, missile firing mayhem.

At first, when you are just a wee little tank, the game is fun. You can hear the tank sound and all of the enemies coming at you have their own little personalities. Killing enemies is as easy as touching them, causing your tank to fire a cool looking tank blast. After a few minutes of play though, you'll just be tapping all over the screen, and after a few upgrades you'll have so many weapons are firing at once that your head will spin. When you get hit enough, pieces of your tank will fall off, and eventually you will blow up when you've taken some random amount of damage. Each time you play, the game has the same build up and finale. It's just madness.

The hardest part of giving Doodle Blast! a mediocre review is that people will start the game up, see the amazing style, and say "Chris Hall doesn't know what he's talking about". There is just no real gameplay involved, and no real strategy to make you feel like you are getting better with more play. Because of the frantic nature, you'll never get that "a-ha" moment that you should get when the game finally clicks. Doodle Blast! will definitely be fun for a few minutes here and there, but I just can't see people coming back to it after a few plays.