Blockhead (created by The Swain) is a psychotic, destructive moron with no sense of right and wrong. He wanders around causing mayhem and mischief wherever his short attention span takes him. The smallest thing distracts him from any goal he may be trying to achieve deep within his pea-sized brain. The only thing even remotely guiding him is his conscience, and that’s where you come in…

Blockhead does absolutely nothing but try the patience of his conscience, a fat middle aged man who is strikingly similar to Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Both Blockhead the character, and Blockhead the game will sorely try YOUR patience.

Firstly I need to say that the art/animation on this game is outstanding. Blockhead interacts with EVERYTHING in the levels and the number of animations you can see as he inspects and dismantles everything is extremely impressive.

Secondly the voice acting and sound work is nearly perfect. It’s not bland monotone dialog, and it doesn’t sound like it was recorded by a pre-pubescent kid with a crappy Wal-Mart microphone. The character’s personalities REALLY shine through even with just the audio.

Where this game fails to impress me is the gameplay, which is remarkably dissapointing considering it was coded by Komix, the super-duper programmer who single-handedly coded the complex engine behind Triachnid. The CONCEPT of the gameplay is great. Basically you have to manage the attention span of blockhead and the anger of his conscience to complete day to day tasks without too much collateral damage.

According to the tutorial, any command you give will cause Blockead’s attention span to drop, and any stupid acts by Blockhead will piss off his conscience. When Blockhead is about to do something bad you are supposed to be able to hit the “Interrupt” button to break his concentration when he flashes green. Doing this SHOULD give you a short opportunity to redirect Blockhead’s attention somewhere else. Instead, even with Blockhead’s attention bar completely full, hitting interrupt more times than not will cause the conscience to go “out to lunch”, taking away your ability to do ANYTHING, even if the anger bar is empty.

A LOT of the time you will also have full attention span and zero anger, but for some reason will not be able to move Blockhead around. The split seconds where you actually CAN move him can be even more frustrating due to the lack of ant path mapping. Blockhead walks directly toward the point you click, regardless of walls or corners and often ends up stuck on a wall or in a completely different room.

The author comments state that there is a control related bug that can be bypassed by reloading the game. That’s just another level of frustration piled on to a game that I already hate playing.

With all that griping aside, I still say it’s worth checking out… just don’t bother trying to play it. Let Blockhead do whatever he wants; the game actually lasts longer that way, and it’s pretty damned funny.

I would really love to play a version of this game that works the way it should and has more fun then frustration.

[ Don't Play Blockhead the Game ]