Reviews

Push it real good

In a world in which children are going missing and giant statues of cows are mysteriously appearing across the land, only one thing can save the day: pulling some God. Damn. BLOX. Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson plays hero, Mallo, in Pullblox: The Pullening. Coming to cinemas this summer. Cut, print, done.

Okay, Pullblox World isn't exactly the next Die Hard instalment, but it doesn't need to be. It's essentially a puzzle-platformer, but without all the merciless punishment and cruel insta-fail frustrations that often accompany the genre. A reset button and the ability to rewind are offered from the start, so a mistimed jump or dumb mistake won't necessarily mean a Game Over.



Pullblox first came out on the eShop for 3DS and met with such huge success that it spawned a sequel, Fallblox, and now this Wii U exclusive, Pullblox World. By pulling and pushing blocks in a giant, climbable structure, you ascend to higher places, climbing upwards until you reach the goal, which in most of the levels is a crying child.

This is all presented in a colourful, chunky style that dictates the tone of the game, as playful and simple as a Fisher Price set. Colour-coded blocks handily illustrate how far each unit has been pulled out: green is one step, yellow is two and pink is three and a moveable camera makes it easy to see all angles of the puzzle.

It looks fantastic on the Wii U. There's a brief flicker of disappointment at the loss of the first game's stereoscopic 3D capabilities, where the blocks popped out in a satisfyingly tangible way, but that's quickly forgotten when you clap your eyes on the lovely HD sharpness of the blocks and the vibrancy on the TV and GamePad.



That said, larger puzzles initially present a bit of a problem, with the GamePad and the TV screen showing the same zoomed-in view. This is quickly rectified with a quick zoom out and a pan around to see all the detail, but the option to glance at the TV for the bigger picture would have been a bonus.

There are more than 250 puzzles in total, ranging from the absurdly easy tutorial levels, through aesthetically pleasing 'mural' levels depicting climbable dolphins, pencils and aubergines, to 'Mysterious Pullblox' - puzzles with a twist, such as like-coloured blocks moving in tandem. Some brainteasers are direct repeats from the original game, but the Mysterious Pullblox are all new - though if you've played the original, this might be a dealbreaker, as they're unlocked after playing puzzles that you've either seen before or at least feel very similar to them.

Most Pullblox puzzles start off easy, but test your ability to think ahead as you go. You can either plan it all out at the beginning like a mastermind architect, or take our approach of trial-and-error. Neither is the wrong choice, and often the latter will give you a better idea of how each block works together as you stumble along. Reaching the top using nothing but your own brain feels as great as it did on the 3DS, even if you find yourself staring at the screen, scratching your head for 20 minutes.

Old favourite, Pullblox Studio, returns, giving us the option to design our own puzzles, which can be uploaded, downloaded and shared with others at the Pullblox World Fair (or shared with 3DS via QR codes). Dipping into the online 'fair' offers potentially limitless, not to mention free, DLC, while also offering the challenges that the gentle in-game puzzles never cook up. This was likely Nintendo's intention: let the game serve as an intro to ideas we can use in our own brutal builds.



Some might scoff at the idea of a game being kind, forgiving and gently encouraging in an industry that is so often about being destructive, cruel and almost constantly insulting to your mother's virtue. We've arrived at a point where games that are punishing to play and near-impossible to get through without at least one rage-induced, vein-popping breakdown are celebrated for their sheer brutality towards those who play them.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of masochism. It's probably what our primary school headmaster would have deemed 'character building', as long as the character you're building is an eight-foot statue made entirely of bricks of solid fury. Pullblox World is like the lovely deputy headmaster who smells faintly like lavender and keeps a box of tissues that have pictures of tiny dinosaurs on them on his desk. It's a reassuring, soft-around-the-edges game that focuses on pure, childlike enjoyment, which is just what we needed after a week of hating each other over Mario Kart 8.