Puzzle titles are among my favourite games to play these days, and adding physics into the mix only ramps up my interest. So when we got word of Blow & Fly I was immediately interested. Sadly I found myself getting nothing but frustrated with its mechanics and puzzles, any small sparks of fun quickly eradicated but fiddly controls and imprecise physics.
The premise is as simple as could be though. We’re able to roll our fish around small puzzle levels, with a press of the A button sending us flying through the air, the aim being to get to the end goal (in this case, a toilet to flush them down). Almost immediately though I found myself frustrated not by challenge, but the inputs themselves.
Rolling around is easy enough if a tad floaty and imprecise. Jumping is altogether a pain in the ass though. When pressing A the fish exudes a puff of air out of its mouth. A fine idea, but its very hard to keep track of where the mouth is when moving at any sort of speed. The opening levels are simple enough to bypass this flaw, but even before the end of the first set of 12 levels I found myself aching for some better way to control the game. It almost feels tailor made for twin stick controls but alas, we can only use the left stick to rotate our fish.
Once we jump we can’t then puff out air again until we land which is a fair enough restriction, but in conjunction with the fiddly aiming means that there were far too many instances of missing a jump by a fraction seemingly through no fault of our own. We are thrown a bone in an unlimited option to send out a dummy jump. This lets us see where we’ll land before committing to a jump. Again, a fine idea but even a fractional roll after a dummy jump can see us fail, and when there are a sequence of quick jumps that need doing this addition is less than useless. Restarts are quick, and levels are short, but I found too many instances of one seemingly easy jump constantly causing me to fail thanks to the iffy aiming and controls.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good platforming challenge, and have bashed my head against many a super hard Meat Boy level or two, but at least there I knew that I failed because I missed something. In Blow & Fly, it all too often feels like I failed because the controls and physics were too haphazard to accurately manipulate. This feels in the same vein as The Impossible Game or ten tonne of mobile titles that are designed not for a challenge, but to test your patience.
Plus, the audio work is utter crap and actively made me want to turn the game off.
Conclusion
With some grit and determination you may find something to enjoy in Blow & Fly, but for most I feel it’ll be a title that is removed from the playlist shortly after starting it. A neat-on-paper but awkward-in-practice mechanic just doesn’t have what it takes to keep us invested for long.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
