I’ll admit, as a core gamer, it’s been hard to love the Wii these past couple years. In between tent pole releases of huge franchises like Zelda and Mario, we’re left with the sour taste of third-party shovelware and mini-game collections I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. All that was before I played Boom Blox, and if this is what casual gaming on the Wii has the potential to become, then sign me up.

The first thing to point out about Boom Blox is the physics. Powered by the Havok engine, the towers that make up the levels of the game sway and react almost perfectly to whatever force you exert on them. If you throw a ball and dislodge a particularly critical piece of the structure, you’ll see the whole thing start to lean in that direction, and if the the weight shift is great enough and the momentum gets rolling, it’ll start to topple. The same rules apply to levels where you find yourself sliding out “blox” and trying to keep a structure standing (think digital Jenga); when you pull out a critical piece, the whole stack will bend and warp, and normally, all you can do is grab frantically at pieces trying to maximize your score before the whole thing comes tumbling down.

There is a great deal of variety in Boom Blox, and the tools and objectives remain fresh and challenging all the way through the single-player affair. While things start out simple enough with you trying to knock over towers of blox in as few throws as possible, things quickly ramp up as you face later stages that require you to carefully slide out pieces without upsetting the structure, constructing paths so characters can get from one side to the other, or using a ray gun or six-shooter to blast away incoming baddies. It’s the type of game that’s very, very hard to get bored with.

The single-player experience is divided into Explore and Adventure modes, with the former giving you the opportunity to try out all the game’s cool tools and features, while the latter strings together a few nonsensical stories that flesh out the objectives for the upcoming levels. Explore mode is the more thoughtful affair, often presenting you with a puzzle of blox laid out in such a manner that, if you think it through thoroughly, you can usually completely disrupt and destroy in one or two throws. Obviously, the game would be boring if there were only one type of block to hit, so the team devised a whole armada of blox, from point and penalty blox to blox that explode when they come in contact with one another and much more. The sheer diversity of the pieces will have you carefully pondering nearly every move you make.

There is something deeply satisfying about taking your camera and looking at a structure from all over, and then throwing balls at it until you have the “Aha!” moment where you discern how to bring the whole thing crashing to the ground. This feeling is augmented by the incredibly clever and detailed level designs, and some of the things you’ll see the blox do really makes you believe that the development team spent a lot of time and energy crafting these challenges, knowing full well the joy you would have wrecking them relentlessly.