Banzai Blowfish!: Like Angry Birds but with Blowfish — Baannzzaaii!

Red Piston, a Canadian app company, has released a highly addictive game for the iPhone called Banzai Blowfish. It’s a physics-based puzzle game with 40 beautiful levels, bright animations, and it enables players to share their achievements with Game Center.

At first glance, you can’t help but think of Angry Birds which isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact we’re huge fans of Angry Birds at GeekBeat so we say it as a compliment. Like Angry Birds, the app uses cute cartoon characters, colourful hand-drawn backgrounds, and it also challenges users through physics-based action puzzles.

To set the scene: “King Hikari’s son has gone crazy and captured all of the Blowfish in Lake Fuji. It’s now up to one heroic fish to save his friends and restore order to the land.”

Gameplay

The time is now. Your objective is to rescue needy Blowfish from captivity by triggering elements like springboards at just the right times. As a result the Blowfish will be thrown into the air, hopefully crashing into the caged Blowfish you’re trying to rescue before the clock runs out. Timing is everything.

Baannnzaaiiii!

It’s not going to be easy. There are a series of obstacles in the way including; sharp icicles, windmill shaped bamboo that can knock you off ledges, and of course gravity.

The elements that move the Blowfish around can be best described as spring-loaded bamboo, which in addition to catapulting the fish into the air, also save them from falling down pits. To pass a level, players must activate the bamboo in the right combination causing the Blowfish to bounce along each element. And, if you do it correctly, you’ll crash into the cagged fish as we’d mentioned.

A few levels in, the game starts getting very tricky. By the time you reach stage five you’ll be completely sucked in. Stage two, level two will make you cry.

There are 40 levels as we’d said, with 5 different stages in gameplay (8 levels in each), all sporting various themes; rock, snow, night, water, volcano. If you like the look of Angry Birds you’ll be right at home with the themes and appearance of this game.

Drawbacks: At times you get stuck and need to restart the level. Usually, its a case where you would have died anyhow but it’s still a bug. As an example, in the first stage, if you fail to drop a rock, the character will get stuck in a hole until you restart the level. This problem continued through the game when the Blowfish lost momentum, it just seemed to sit there. It’s really is not a big deal, we just thought we’d note it.

The Bottom Line:

Overall, this game is fun, crazy addictive and it has loads of replay value. Bonzai Blowfish is available for $1.99 in the app store.