Hold on – where on earth did this one come from? Sitting on my desk here in front of me is the rather colourful box for EA’s latest Wii game Boom Blox, with lots of little exploding boxes and some pretty odd rectangular animals flying about left, right and centre. Just above that, the name Steven Spielberg is proudly on display to indicate the helping hand that one of Hollywood’s favourite sons had in making the whole thing. It has the style, sure, and it most definitely has the backing to push it into the public’s eye, but how many of you were actually expecting Boom Blox to be any good?

Perhaps it was just me who let Boom Blox float past without much of a passing glance. Whatever the case, having exhausted the game to the point of the disc melting itself and needing to be poured out of the Wii disc slot and be reset, it’s safe to say that it’s not only a good game, but it’s undoubtedly one of the console’s finest titles to date. Who’d have thought chucking balls at bricks could be so much fun, eh?

Boom Blox is, on a basic level, rather akin to Jenga meets bowling. Divided amongst a number of chapters that task you with a different type of puzzle, you’ll be chucking balls at different types of blocks in order to cause all sorts of chaos, swinging blocks around on a bit of elastic to knock over as much as you can and carefully sliding blocks out of structures without causing them to fall flat. It’s more of a mixed bag than you would have originally thought, and it makes beautiful use of the Wii-mote too.

Take the Jenga-style sections as an example. In these you are presented with a number of ever-increasingly complex structures from which you need to pull out golden points blocks without causing grey negative point blocks to tumble to the ground. By aiming your cursor at the screen and holding the A button down you can grab your chosen block and then slide and nudge your block with remarkable sensitivity and accuracy from its location. It’s tense, exciting stuff that rewards a steady hand, and the way that the physics work so well to provide a convincing sense of frailty to the structures adds to the fun no end.

Then there’re the block toppling sections that require you to lob a ball at various towers and blocks to knock as many point blocks onto the floor as you can. Once again this is merely a matter of choosing where you would like to aim by waving a cursor about the screen – rotating the level with the Nunchuck if needed – and holding A, with a small throwing motion and the release of the button lobbing your little sphere toward its destination. The levels are cleverly designed and reward experimentation, with a number of possibilities and avenues open for curious players to explore in an attempt to solve the puzzle in as few throws as possible.

In a way, this sums up the best bit of Boom Blox; the fact that you can mess around, try different things and not be penalised should they not work out. You can restart a puzzle with a mere click of a few buttons, whilst there’s also a scaled level of achievement with bronze, silver and gold medals on offer. This not only gives the player plenty of scope to either rush through or perfect each level to their preference, but it also means that Boom Blox is a brilliant game for younger gamers to have a go on and be able to achieve something. Steven Spielberg said that he wanted Boom Blox to be ‘a game that he could play with his children’, and to this extent it succeeds beautifully.

Another thing that EA have got right with the game is the way it teaches you the basic ins-and-outs of gameplay. Locking the ‘proper’ game modes until you complete the tutorial may seem annoying at first, but the whole thing can be completed fairly easily and quickly and gives you a good grounding in what is actually a surprisingly simple set of rules. Along the way you’ll learn what vanish and bomb blocks do, how to use chemical blocks effectively and how you swing a block around to cause havoc, and with each mini challenge being good fun to boot it’s hardly a chore having to work your way through them to open the rest of the game up.

Once you’ve managed to do this, you’ll find that the rest of the single player game divides itself up between the Explore and Adventure modes. The former takes each different variable in the game – the different types of blocks, and the different types of puzzle – and sets them into six separate chapters so that you can work through a series of similarly-themed challenges depending on what tickles your fancy. Each level has plenty of puzzles to offer and then goes and unloads a whole lot more once you complete them all to a certain standard, so you could theoretically lose whole days just working your way through them on their own without even touching anything else the game offers.

Should you manage to tear yourself away, the Adventure mode basically takes the same formula and adds a little story to proceedings. To be honest the stories, whilst rather twee and colourful, are something of nothing and go along the lines of a tribe of sheep losing their precious stack of gems or a mother gorilla needing to traverse a tricky set of levels to get to her babies, but underneath all this is a more mixed bunch of puzzles that are thrown your way in a number of chapters, making use of every kind of puzzle the game can chuck at you and adding a twist, such as having to chuck bombs at marauding packs of cows to stop them running off with your loot. Doing these tasks to high levels will unlock all kinds of settings and characters, all of which you can use in the rather nifty Create mode.

This, as you would imagine, is a real ace up Boom Blox’s sleeve, giving players who have exhausted their patience with the various standard puzzles a chance to set up their own crazy contraptions. Anyone who used to get the classic board game Mouse Trap out of the box back in the day and set up the little plastic middle part without paying any attention to the boring squares around the outside will really feel at home here, with the game giving a surprisingly large area to fill up with blocks and the like. It’s also remarkably simple to use in a Lego sort of way, and you can share your best efforts with your Wii friends so they can itch their noodle at your creative brilliance. Top stuff.

The other thing that pitches Boom Blox squarely toward being a Wii favourite is the multiplayer mode, allowing you and a mate to take each other on or work together on a selection of puzzles. The general catastrophic nature of the game works brilliantly when you play as a pair and chucks up plenty of humorous scrapes and near-misses to gasp and chuckle over, and when paired with the game’s colourful cartoon visuals and bounce-along soundtrack it’s something that’ll have you grinning like a lottery winner time and time again.

Of course, once you’ve explored the puzzles and been through everything Boom Blox has to offer you aren’t going to come back as often as you originally thought, as with most puzzle games. Still, for the way it uses the Wii-mote beautifully, the way it oozes fun with its visuals and sounds and the plethora of different puzzles to work through, this has rather snuck up on the rails and become a game that all Wii owners owe themselves. The Wii software menu might be a little sparse right now, but more stuff like this on the menu and we’ll all be gorging off it and becoming big fat Wii fanboys quicker than you can eat a cheese Wotsit. Highly recommended.