Blowy Fish

Developer: One Man Band Games | Publisher: One Man Band Games | Release Date: 2015 | Genre: Action / Casual | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

The ocean is a dangerous place, especially if you are a blowfish with a penchant for bouncing and rolling along instead of swimming. Not as dangerous as the monsters lurking in Tasty Blue, but definitely a hostile environment for a poor blowfish! Originally a mobile title, Blowy Fish garnered enough interest on Steam Greenlight to make the jump to PC. It is a game that challenges you to propel a blowfish past dangerous obstacles by pulling on its tail and releasing. Once the blowfish is in motion you have no further control until it comes to a stop, so lots of planning and a little luck are required to keep it out of harm’s way.

Although Blowy Fish is a casual title through and through, it is one of those games that are hard to put down once you are hooked. It took us about three hours to complete the 50 levels in the game and even then we jumped straight into the endless mode to get on to the leaderboards. Each of the 50 levels requires you to propel your fish past rocks, jellyfish, mines, electric eels, and other dangers to reach the finish line that is located 500 meters from your starting point. Most hazards will kill your blowfish the instant it touches them, but some like the electric eels and clams will send it bouncing around erratically instead. More often than not this results in your fish careening into some other dangerous hazard, so it’s best to just try and avoid anything that is not a starfish.

The starfish incidentally acts as the “currency” in the game and is used to unlock cosmetic items for your blowfish. These are grouped into hats, accessories, clothing, glasses and beards, all collected via a little mini-game. In total there are about eighty of these unlockables and customizing the blowfish is actually a lot of fun. Once you have unlocked enough items, you can even start combining them into matching sets.

Blowy Fish retains the big, bright, bold visuals of the mobile versions, but still manages to look surprisingly good on a big screen. The amount of enemies and obstacles as well as all the different outfits for your blowfish keeps things interesting and the animations, while not spectacular, are decent enough. About the only real criticism we have about the visuals is the fact that the background and tunnel walls remain unchanged for all the levels. Mixing things up with some sand or coral reefs could have boosted the visuals, but since the tunnel layouts are randomly generated this was probably not feasible. It is also worth bearing in mind that Blowy Fish was made entirely by a solo developer and, considering its pocket change price, the visuals are actually not too shabby.

Although the audio of the game consists mainly of creative commons tunes, the end result is quite fitting. There is a nice mix of genres and everything is just so upbeat that it’s hard not to play with a smile on your face. The one click controls of the game retains the simplicity of the mobile version, but works fine using a mouse. Holding down the left-mouse button allows you to adjust the angle as well as the force with which to launch your blowfish when you let go. Even with careful aiming your blowfish can get knocked around by ramming fish, become tangled in seaweeds, knock over toxic barrels, end up swallowed and spat out by clams or roll down steep inclines. You can even land on bubbles that inflate your blowfish, making it even harder to steer clear of harm. This means that an element of luck is involved and those spiky sea urchins always seem to be exactly where you land, but the game is addictive enough that you’ll constantly go back for just “one more” go.

The game is definitely a lot of fun to play and considering its ridiculously low price offers plenty of value for money. New to this Steam version is the addition of Steam Achievements, Leaderboards and trading cards. However, the game is still available completely free to play on Android, so anyone who prefers this type of game on their mobile devices should go check out the Google Play store.