Inky Blinky Bob
Critic Reviews for Inky Blinky Bob
For a game which mainly advertises being in a hot air balloon, fighting against a monster hot air balloon. I was not expecting to be on the ground most of the time. The player does a lot of mindless quests that apart from a couple do nothing for the plot. With some being a dude asking you to just get moonshine back, while another was just turning off some valves. I wish I could say that the quest with the sea monster was cool, but it’s too brief. Dialogue is never serious and ruins the whole atmosphere of Inky Blinky Bob. Don’t get me wrong a killer hot air balloon, is not exactly the most serious. But I expected the NPCs to say how he is effecting them. Bob himself seems absent too, due to only attacking the player when they are airborne. And even then, you won’t see him flying through the sky as a warning. He just appears, locks you in place until he is defeated. In the end I did not beat the game due to a soft lock of not receiving a radio from Ralph to tell me what to do next. All the Tesla towers were activated, but the giant dome never shutdown. Inky Blinky Bob is okay, but just misses the mark. I’d suggest maybe playing Choo-Choo Charles instead. So I’ll be giving it the Thumb Culture Silver Award.
Inky Blinky Bob wants and tries to be a lot of things: a vehicle-based FPS, a survival horror, an open-world RPG and, at times, a quest-based nonlinear adventure and a stealth game. The saying goes: ‘too many chefs spoil the broth’, and in this case, perhaps ‘too many genres spoil the game’. In some ways, this mish-mash of genres actually works pretty well; in others, much less so. It’s good and all to experiment and blend things together to craft a fine mix, much like cocktails; however, even for the most experienced studios, never mind an Indie one on their first Steam release, this would be a daunting task. The result of great ambitions and only passable execution is still better than most similar cases: a game that works and plays out just well enough to be passable, but not nearly well enough to be actually good, let alone great.
