Review: BLUEY: THE VIDEOGAME is Close to Being Done Proper

A mere 2-ish months ago, Outright Games announced that the hit Australian animated series Bluey was getting a video game! Developed by Artax Games, Bluey: The Videogame lets up to 4 players take on the role of the various Heeler family members as you play through an original story as well as four minigames. The game is available to play on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4/5, and Xbox consoles (affiliate link). The Outright Games team was kind enough to send me a copy of the game on Xbox, but all thoughts below are my own. You can purchase a copy of the game from your favorite stores including GameStop (affiliate link).

Become immersed in the world of Bluey in this interactive sandbox adventure as players navigate faithfully recreated and iconic locations including Bluey’s home - fully explorable for the first time. Engage in story-driven episodic gameplay with activities inspired by fan favourite moments from the show as well as a brand-new four-part storyline created in partnership with Artax Games, BBC Studios and the show’s producers at Ludo Studio.

Before I go much further, I feel a need to establish some expectations. My score at the bottom of the page is not inherently about how good of a game I think Bluey is. The score will be doing its best to look at Bluey in the context of what it’s trying to do: be a fun game for kids to enjoy and hopefully parents as well. With that, let’s take a look.

I want to start with the negatives. For being a game meant for children and families, the controls can be less than intuitive. On Xbox, you interact with objects by pressing X. Unfortunately, it appears that you have to double-tap X, but this took some fiddling around to discover. I was also annoyed at the fact that there’s no real way to tell what you are trying to interact with. There have been a couple of times where I went to pick up one thing but ended up picking up something else in the vicinity. Definitely not a great feeling. My wife also noticed that there were a couple of times that my daughter went to jump onto the stairs in the Heeler house and she ended up jumping through the stairs. Oops.

On the more technical side, I was a little disappointed in the graphics. The characters look nice and crisp, but then a lot of the backgrounds and items were very blurry. I understand that this game wasn’t going to win best-looking game, but it’s a bummer to have the characters stick out because they are the only assets in focus. In addition, the audio balance seemed to vary from scene to scene which was distracting to me.If that weren’t enough the game does have some bugs. There have been a few times where I or a family member got seemingly stuck in a spot and only became free after much finangling. However, my wife and daughter were recently replaying an episode and my daughter got stuck behind a slide and could not move or escape no matter what they tried. Even after leaving the episode, my daughter could not do anything. Only after exiting to the main menu and going back into the game was she able to participate.

Now let’s talk about aspects that I feel pretty neutral about. The story is short. I wasn’t timing it, but it took me and my family probably less than an hour to beat the story. Based on times on playthrough videos, it looks like it’s taking most people 45-60 minutes. This makes sense to me as an episode of Bluey is only about 5-7 minutes instead of the more standard 20-25 minutes. Having a short story is kind of the brand’s thing. The story itself is fine. It doesn’t stand out as anything special to me, but it’s not bad. One odd thing in my opinion is that at least in the final part of the story there are several mini-cutscenes very quickly one after the other which does break the fluidity a bit, but it also helps make sure all players are together via checkpoints.

Now let’s talk about the positives. Even though the story isn’t my favorite, it’s still nice to hear the same voices as the show. I also love that it’s a couch co-op game that works with up to four players and each player can pick any character they want. No one is locked to any particular character. Possibly the best feature of Bluey is the fact that as you play through the story, it does not require each character to get to the checkpoint. As soon as any player gets to a checkpoint, all players are moved there. If you’ve played games with younger children, you know how much of a struggle this can be at times.

It’s also a lot of fun to get to explore various locations in the world of Bluey. Honestly, the layout of the Heeler house doesn’t make much sense to me. Apparently the kitchen is upstairs by the bedrooms instead of downstairs by the living room area like I thought. We also get to explore the park and beach which is fun.

It’s time to talk about the minigames. They’re fine. Keepy Uppy is literally just where the players try to prevent the balloon from touching the ground. Magic Xylophone has one player run around with a xylophone freezing the other players but the other players can run around and unfreeze each other. Chattermax Chase has the players trying to hold onto Chattermax until time runs out, but if he gets stolen, anyone nearby gets frozen in place to give the thief some space. Finally, Ground is Lava sees the players jumping across platforms trying to collect three different stars. They’re all very simple and your mileage will vary. One cool aspect is that you can be walking around and spontaneously decide to play a minigame and it will just start where you are (with a few exceptions).

At the end of the day, the idea for Bluey is good. The minigames are fun for a little bit if you’re an adult and kids seem to love it. My daughter the other day said that the game would get a 10/10 from her. There’s something to be said for that. Unfortunately, I found that the execution of the game was a little lackluster and some extra polish would go a long way. On the plus side, these are all things that could be addressed through an update. At the end of the day, if your family loves the show Bluey, then Bluey: The Videogame will be a big hit. Particularly with younger gamers.