You know those times when you're playing a side-scrolling shooter and some enormous construct lumbers onto the screen, spewing thick gouts of bullets. And you're all, like, 'No way!'. In Blast Works, that thing is you.

Read the review after the jump.

Shoot-'em-ups, or shmups, or side-scrollers, or just plain "shooters" in the old-school sense, or whatever you want to call them, are as ancient and unchanged as crocodiles. Blast Works intends to evolve the genre a bit with two twists: a Katamai Damacy ball-o-junk gimmick and lots of user-generated content.

Normally in these shooters, everything you shoot explodes. Points ensue. Repeat until high score. But in Blast Works, when you shoot an enemy, it tumbles through the air. If you can catch it before it falls off the bottom of the screen, it sticks onto your ship and resumes firing on your behalf. It'll also serve as a shield from incoming fire until it's blown off.

In short order, you'll go from flying a little ship to Borging yourself into a chaotic monstrosity advancing left to right, spitting out clouds and blossoms and streams of bullets. It's absolutely absurd and not necessarily in a bad way. There's something awfully satisfying about being the ginormous impervious boss ship for a change.

The second twist is the muscular editor and easy content sharing through Blast Works Depot. Here you'll find scads of ships, enemies, and backgrounds. Simply click on the ones you want, fire up Blast Works on your Wii, and they'll download in a jiffy. The editor itself isn't as user-friendly as, say, Boom Blox, but you don't need to ever touch it. There are plenty of entire levels available to download and play.

But the problem is that these two really nice twists – the Katamari-style ship glomming and the user-created content – are stuck in a superficial shoot-'em-up. There's ultimately little to do beyond wriggling a bit on your inexorable trip from the left to the right. Some of the artwork in inventive, but Blast Works is built from modest tech, based on line drawings with almost no sound or special effects.

If it feels limited, there's a reason. The game is based on a freeware shooter called Tumiki Fighters, which was created by a Japanese programmer known for his abstract side-scrolling shooters. This feels very much like someone's school project, or a programmer demo. There's a lot of raw technique, but not much affection. Contrast it to Katamari Damacy, which got by minus much wow-factor because it had charm. In that game, a really funky and creative world shrank underneath the awesome but ultimately benevolent might of your growing clump of stuff. But Blast Works, by contrast, just gets messier and messier, showing less and less personality as you get bigger and bigger, blocking more of the screen.

While I'm playing Blast Works, I can't help but think of Geometry Wars, another relatively simple shooter. Geometry Wars introduced enough gameplay twists to keep things interesting, but it also gave its simple vector graphics an enormous amount of personality. From the behaviors of the enemies to the varied challenges of the different levels to the added bonuses you got with your drone, Geometry Wars was a shooter with character. But Blast Works, on the other hand, is just a shooter with lots and lots of geometry.