Blow & Fly is a game about a blowfish that wants to blast itself back into the toilet bowl. It’s a great premise that (much like fish) doesn’t quite use the full legs the initial premise promises. Instead, we get a playable but relatively safe projectile launching physics based platform puzzler. Try saying that aloud quickly.
Controlling the fish is simple. The fish can roll around with the left stick to aim its fin in the direction of where you want to blow yourself too. A press of a button will send you flying and the angle of attack will determine where you end up. Early on the game is simply out clearing spikes, staying on smaller platforms or making it up mountains. Soon precision starts to creep in and that’s where Blow & Fly plays best. Spinning in mid air, you can line up your shot if you roll off an edge to fly into a narrow corridor mid wall. You might need to stop the after landing roll quickly or bounce from slope to slope to chain moves. This is where the challenge and skill comes into play and the difficulty curve starts to rise nicely.
Outside of the basic platforming, Blow & Fly adds in bounce pads, gravity switches, keys and water drop save points for when levels start to become more than a couple of screens long. These are tied to new worlds you open by completing the levels. Toilets, your completion points each level, do carry a par system like golf stroke shots but its entirely up to you if you want to aim for them or not. They are very strict shot limits! Outside of the main game, hidden mini levels you can stumble across entirely by accident serve as nice palette cleansers. Fishball is a decent one, making you string together 5 shots in a basketball hoop, whereas others like Ice Rink make the floor slidey for single level. I’d have liked more of these as part of the main quest as they added variety that the main levels slightly lacked. Unlockable fish are also available too but are cosmetic only.
Blow & Fly is totally playable and inoffensive but once I’d finished it, I felt like it was fine but not something I’d actively fly back to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it (although sometimes I felt like I did the same thing twice and got two different results) but it didn’t stand out in a way that say, Baboon (PS Vita/ PS4) did that offers a similar style of game for a similar price point. Easy platinum though and cross buy too!
Review copy provided by publisher.
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