Boom Blox Bash Party is the inverse of that destructive phase you went through in childhood when you burned or smashed all your model airplanes. As a kid, you probably discovered the joy of building first. And then, at some point, that gave way to the joy of smashing. All those airplanes you spent so much time lovingly gluing together and painting were just so much fodder for all the awesome ways plastic would melt and smash. I may be inferring too much from my own childhood, but barring some child psychologist telling me otherwise -- and, really, how many child psychologists are going to read a Boom Blox Bash Party review? -- I'm going to assume that's just how it works. You build stuff, you break it, you grow up. But in Boom Blox Bash Party everything is switched around. First comes the joy of smashing. Then you discover how to make your own levels. The growing-up part is mostly discouraged, since you're presumably an adult playing with blocks. It's possibly a guiltier pleasure than anime, Funyuns or cheesy sci-fi novels. The doggone cute little animals don't make it any easier.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is physics in action.

Boom Blox is primarily about knocking over block towers and watching physics in action. The Wii is exactly as next-gen as it needs to be in the glorious presentation of intricately built stuff teetering and tumbling down. Bash Party adds just enough gimmickry to distinguish its puzzles from those of the original Boom Blox. Gravity (or the lack thereof) and buoyancy are the new physics guest stars. Welcome to outer-space levels in which edifices shatter without regard for up and down. It's pretty darn glorious. This is the LEGO version of planets exploding and stars going supernova. The underwater stuff isn't nearly so spectacular, despite a giant squid who's not above messing everything up. (She even comes up for air to mess around with the pirate-ship levels.) But it comes into its own when you discover buoyant barrels holding blocks in place. Something so simple as upside-down gravity! Elsewhere in Bash Party's bag of new tricks are force fields and conveyer belts. All these gimmicks are such pure examples of how physics makes everything better. Boom Blox has convinced me that if you could get the physics right, you could make an awesome game about playing with a sock (besides Noby Noby Boy, of course, which is a game about playing with a sock after you've taken LSD).

Boom Blox Bejeweled.

Also new in Bash Party is some tried-and-true match-three gameplay, which has brought my progress to a screeching halt. The new slingshot trick is gratifying, but hard to aim precisely, which makes for a few frustrating levels. The shooting-gallery stuff is back, but only in small doses. There's some frantic timed throwing, which gets my pick for the levels I wish they'd left out. You'll probably have your own list of levels you wish they'd left out, but it'll probably be short. Besides, Boom Blox Bash Party is like the weather in [insert name of place that has weather here]: If you don't like it, hang around for five minutes. Also, don't get it into your head that this is just a few new levels based on the new gimmicks. There's enough content here to more than displace the previous game. And while it's a bit of a shame that we can't import the original game's levels into Bash Party, I trust some of you enterprising level builders will get on that.

That's a lot of c-blocks.

That's because the second half of Boom Blox Bash Party, the part you get to once you can see past the childlike delight of seeing stuff fall over, is the level builder. As far as I can tell, it's not changed too much since the previous game. Of course, I didn't build any levels in the previous game because there was no need to. Oh, sure, I dropped a couple of monkeys into an arena to see what would happen. I stacked up a few blocks and knocked them over with baseballs just to verify that, yep, it was that easy to do. But once I'd done that, I was done. What Electronic Arts failed to understand about level builders is that I don't want them for me. I want them in there so other people can use them and I can enjoy the fruits of their labor. And that's clearly not something that was supported in the original Boom Blox, which required various shenanigans with Friend Codes and, uh, other stuff that I couldn't be bothered with. 2008 was the dark age of the Wii's non-connectivity.

Yeah, it looks fun, but it's a pain to aim.

So I'm delighted to report that Boom Blox Bash Party has overcome its handicap as being a game by and for the two companies most clueless about online interactivity. Here at last Nintendo and Electronic Arts, both usually synonymous with single-player gaming, get it right. You can easily go online to download new levels, and it's a simple matter to submit stuff you've made to the moderation system, which will presumably filter out the hundreds of penis levels while still letting worthwhile stuff get through. As of launch, EA had plenty of internally created levels available, across all gameplay types, including the competitive and cooperative modes. And there are a few player-made levels cropping up. It looks promising. And I say that as someone who fully learned his lesson when he thought the music studio in Guitar Hero World Tour looked promising. This time, for real.

Dead men topple no blox.

By the way, Bash Party deserves a special nod for its clever cooperative modes. We already know the awesomeness of Boom Blox as a head-to-head game for up to four people. But now Bash Party is a particularly awesome game for two people to put their heads together and work through some fiendishly clever puzzles that require, well, cooperation. For instance, one of you gets the bowling ball to knock the blocks loose. The other gets the bomb that has to be placed into the gaps created. The cooperative levels really get what it takes to make gameplay interesting beyond two people taking turns to get a high score.
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Mars needs blue blox.

The game progression in Bash Party is arranged differently from that in the original Boom Blox. For each mode -- solo, head-to-head and cooperative -- you have a general area and then themed sideshows. To unlock new levels, you have to beat the previous levels. However, you can skip a level by spending "Boom Bux" -- yep, that's what they're called ? earned as you play. This also applies to the level editor in case you're impatient about wanting to use specific bits of the game before you've unlocked them. If you're content to just play through Bash Party as it's designed, the Boom Bux are going to be pretty worthless. In fact, I'm sitting on several thousand and I don't have anything to do with them. If anyone needs any Boom Bux, you can have some of mine. But leave it to EA to let you buy your way around playing its game. However, in this instance, EA has made a game that you'd have to be crazy to buy your way around playing. I would say that Boom Blox Bash Party is a delight from start to finish, but with this sort of replayability, multiplayer support and free online content, I'm not sure it has any such thing as a finish.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.