Boppin is one of those odd games you stumble upon while looking for something else to play. To its credit, it lives up to that nature by being an odd, yet addicting puzzle game. The object of the game is hard to describe, but the general idea is that you are a little character on a screen that has to clear blocks off of the screen while avoiding obstacles scattered about in a pseudo-sensical fashion. You basically "throw" a block at a group of blocks, and if you strike a block of the same type, all adjacent blocks of that type disappear.
Boppin is one of those odd games you stumble upon while looking for something else to play. To its credit, it lives up to that nature by being an odd, yet addicting puzzle game. The object of the game is hard to describe, but the general idea is that you are a little character on a screen that has to clear blocks off of the screen while avoiding obstacles scattered about in a pseudo-sensical fashion. You basically "throw" a block at a group of blocks, and if you strike a block of the same type, all adjacent blocks of that type disappear. You earn bonuses for removing large amounts of blocks at once, but lose a life every time a thrown block hits
a different block or fails to hit anything. If you clear all of the blocks out of a level, then you advance to the next puzzle.
The difficulty starts out almost tutorial-like, allowing players to get the hang of the mechanics of the game before having to tackle real challenges. After the first few puzzles, the game gets progressively more difficult. The challenge mostly comes from careful planning regarding placement of blocks and sequences of elimination. Some of the puzzles can be annoyingly hard, but they are all possible to beat.
Now for the pretty parts. The graphics for Boppin are fantastic. Everything has a cartoony feel to it, but it works well for this game. The puzzles themselves have totally different graphics from level to level, including everything from a flower garden to a circuit board to an architectural sketch. It takes a bit of getting used to, since at first it's hard to discern which parts of the screen are blocks and which parts are just the environment, but after a while you adjust. The sound is also well done, with reasonable noises produced whenever any event takes place. The music, while a little discordant, is also whimsical and well-placed, adding to the overall effect of the graphics on the environment.
I must admit that the controls are a little tough to get used to at first, and it is a bit of a drag that you have to have a joystick in order to support two player mode (could it have been that hard to have one player use the alpha keys and the other use the numpad?), but since the only actions the characters can take are walking around and throwing blocks, it's not too steep of a learning curve.
Maybe I'm a little jaded, but this game is often advertised as being violent and adult-oriented (even by the makers of Boppin), and I don't really see that at all. The most violent thing in the game is that when a character loses his last life or "commits suicide", he'll often use a samurai sword on himself and spill red pixels everywhere. Other than that, most everything else has a Bejeweled appearance to it, such that you'd be surprised if anything violent happened.
In short, Boppin is definitely worth a look, and it makes for a fun & off-the-wall game to play with a friend or two.
