Having played both, personally I'm glad I bought boom blox over mariokart (though I will get kart eventually). It really is just amazing fun. I was starting to get worried because I beat the first scenario in adventure mode, and I was blazing through explore mode, and I thought "it looks like I'll be done with single player before I know it, that's sad", then I realized that after you beat explore mode and adventure mode, there is an explore mode 2 (with more difficulty puzzles) and an adventure mode 2 (with more difficult levels). And I realized how gigantic the single player mode is, and was again made happy.
Let me explain the difference between explore mode and adventure mode.
Explore mode sets up static puzzles, and gives you parameters to beating the puzzle. For instance You have two throws with a baseball to beat this stage, or you need to get 150 points from knocking down point blocks while avoiding knocking down negative point blocks in order to beat this stage. You can stop, look around at the level, plan and think, then act in order to beat the puzzle with the best possible score.
Adventure mode is active, dynamic, and objective oriented. There are AI controlled little people (or sheep, or monkeys or grim reapers ect) that act based on an AI. You have to complete the stage's objective (destroy this tower) but there will be a dynamic AI in the stage too, to complicate things. For instance in a series of stages I just did, I had so many throws to destroy a castle or tower or what have you. But I had to do so without killing my army of wandering sheep, if my whole army died, I lost. To make matters worse, the castle has monkeys that are using long range weapons to kill my sheep army from their towers or castles. Time was of the essence. Rather than being able to stop and think about my throws, I had to throw as soon as the match started trying to quickly perceive weak points in the structure, or pinpoint chemical blocks or explosive blocks in attempt to set off chain reactions, while at the same time making sure the destruction wasn't so out of control that it would wipe out my own army. And again, I had to do so in a limited number of throws, and the AI is dynamic, it won't act exactly the same way twice. I died many times on a number of stages.
Both of the styles offer brilliant challenges, and are incredibly well thought out. Often times after losing an adventure stage a number of times, it would hit me and I would find the perfect throw that would wipe out almost everything in a beautiful chain reaction. If a level says you can do something in 2 throws to get a gold, there is a way even if it's not obvious.
So far, even early on some of the stages are very challenging. Though most of them I've gotten by on the first or second try. I can only imagine how difficult it will be at the end of adventure mode, or how diabolical explore mode 2 will be. I am looking forward to it greatly.
You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.
