Bliss Island Review

A collection of nine mini-games (or perhaps ten - but more on that later), Pom Pom's com-pom-pilation, as I like stammering it, is about pointing with the analogue nub and pressing X or circle to direct puffs of air. So directed, these precise puffs fire fluffy balls at flowers, fire fruity balls into the mouths of hungry monsters, fire fluffy balls into billiards, fire fluffy balls into brick invaders, fire fluffy balls at musical crustaceans, fire fluffy bees around a racetrack, and fire fluffy balls through platform, stone-stepping and floaty side-scrolling fluff-courses. It's somewhat fluffy, and the kitsch graphics give it the look of a sort of weird, anthropomorphic mophead-mutant Pixar film, albeit one done by one of those crap studios who can barely spell "John Lasseter" let alone lick his boots. But I digress.

Ooh, I forgot to mention the story. Basically, you're a zwooph called Hoshi.

Obviously it's still not clear what it is, despite my describing everything you ever do in it, but that's actually deliberate. See, the tasks themselves are very simple, but they don't half faff around with the instruction. For example: "Hoshi enjoys the challenge of smashing the bricks as they crash down the side of the mountain. Use Hoshi's puffs of air, to move the brick ball in the direction the arrow is pointing. Don't let the brick ball fall off the bottom! Use the brick ball to hit the brick invaders. Destroy three of the same coloured bricks in a row. Don't let the bricks reach the bottom of the screen! Don't hit the angry bricks! Otherwise it's a strike and three strikes it's game over!"

I'm not even sure I understand what that says now, but I do know that, like the eight other games, it was glaringly obvious what to do within about seven seconds of loading the actual level: blocks descend, whack the smiling ones, don't whack the frowning ones, repeat.

Each of the games initially has to be unlocked in Adventure mode, which lays out the rules in the above-mocked fashion before prodding you through. Typically you get three chances to not mess up for each of these, and any of said messing up involves starting the level again. Once you've unlocked all nine games, you can play them in Challenge mode, or you can keep going in Adventure mode, where the games repeat and the levels toughen. There's also a two-player wireless mode, where three of the nine are available, plus "Fluffy Football" (yes), which is a variation on the billiards game, which isn't really billiards at all but which shares some common ground. All of which would be more interesting to you, I suspect, if Bliss Island supported game sharing, which it doesn't. Which is useless, then, unless you live in a gated society, throughout which live lots of the descendants of, er, Whichy Which.

And every week you get a day off to try and perfect your puffing.

Unfortunately the quality of the games is inconsistent. The ones based around puffing balls up an incline to whack things like flowers, or to feed them into the mouths of furry monsters, work well thanks to well-implemented physics. Elsewhere the bee racing is a bit manic, and more fun with a friend (if you can find the other person who bought this, anyway), but many of the others are either too short-lived or too harsh on the player. There's one where you have to repeat musical sequences by bashing weird jellybean crabs. Except I am not five. There's also one that involves hopping between rocks in the sky collecting stars, which is sort of like an analogue multidirectional Frogger but devoid of charm or urgency. Like the floaty side-scrolling one, which is a bit like bouncing a bubble through a meatgrinder, there's immediate appeal that immediately vanishes the first time you die and realise that you're not only going to be docked a life, but also sent back to the start, with all the things you've already collected reinstated. Dim.

Which is time, it turns out, better spent having an Internet wank.

It's that sort of thing that negates any goodwill I might have for the quality of the controls, ported expertly from the previous mouse-based system. Equally damning is the lack of a restart option in Adventure mode. If you're obviously going to fail, or think you messed up the start, then that's what you'll want to do. If you do fail, that's what you'll actually do anyway. So why not offer it? It's there in Challenge mode.