Just when you thought there was nowhere to go for sports game developers, along comes Blobby Volley 2. As the name suggests, it's volleyball, but with blobs as players.
It sounds a bit silly - and it is - but Blobby Volley plays surprisingly well and the lack of tanned or bronzed bodies jumping around isn't really missed one bit. The graphics are not exactly stunning - the volleyball pitch is static and the blobs are, well, blobs but it's the simple playability that appeals. It's a little bit like playing Pong! except obviously, the underlying concept is volleyball.
Configuring Blobby Volley 2 is quite a pain, mind you. For a start, I found it impossible to set the CPU as my opponent. It's easy to navigate the setup screens with the mouse or arrow keys but there seemed no way to change the player settings. In the end, I was faced with playing against myself which is fun for a short while but soon loses its appeal! The control keys are displayed in options and you can change these to what you want but I still had problems changing my opponent.
I decided to try and play a network game but no servers could be found. Although the 'Scan for servers' option is clearly visible in 'Network Game', clicking on it got me nowhere and eventually, Blobby Volley simply froze and crashed. In addition to this, some of the 'Do You Want To Quit?' messages were in German so it seems some of the program hasn't been translated properly. You can also Host a game yourself, although this also proved unresponsive when clicked-on.
Blobby Volley 2 is a fun game and is extremely easy to play but the developer could have done a better job at helping users configure the game.
