LG / game / SANTA BLAST
REVIEW
Santa Blast is a December-only diversion for the LG TV.
A free hyper-casual ball-shooter dressed up in a Christmas skin, ported to webOS for Magic Remote pointing. Plays for ten minutes and asks nothing back.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
Santa Blast is a hyper-casual mobile game wearing a Christmas sweater on a 65-inch screen, and it knows it. Desoline has taken the well-worn numbered-ball-shooter template, swapped the cannon for a Santa sprite, dropped a snow-globe behind it, and shipped it to the LG Content Store as a free seasonal download. The Magic Remote pointer does the aiming. That is, more or less, the whole pitch.
The honest version is that this is fine. Not good, not bad — fine. Mechanically it works, the pointer-aiming translation from one-finger touch to webOS is the one design decision that shows any thought, and at zero dollars with no ads it asks nothing of the household beyond the install. Nobody is going to remember this game in March, but the kids will burn ten minutes on it on Christmas morning and that is the entire job.
What stops Santa Blast from clearing the six-point line is the absence of anything beyond the seasonal hook. No high-score persistence, no second skin to keep it relevant in July, no reason to come back once the tree comes down. It is a December novelty, priced and built like one, and graded accordingly.
Santa Blast is a hyper-casual mobile game wearing a Christmas sweater on a 65-inch screen, and it knows it.
FEATURES
Santa Blast is a numbered-ball-shooter in the well-worn mobile mould — Santa stands at the bottom of the screen, fires a constant stream of bullets, and you steer the aim with the Magic Remote pointer to break descending balls labelled with the hit count required to clear them. Hit a ball enough times and it bursts; let one reach the bottom and the round ends.
Controls are pointer-only. There is no directional-pad fallback, no voice-control hook into ThinQ, no profile system, no cloud save. Progress, such as it exists, lives on the TV. The Christmas dressing is wallpaper-deep: snow-globe backdrop, jingle-bell stinger on the menu, Santa sprite in place of the generic shooter cannon. Mechanics are unchanged from a hundred other entries in the genre.
Free with no ads visible in the webOS build at the time of writing — likely because the LG ad-monetization path for small game studios is thin. There is no IAP storefront either.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The Magic Remote port is the one genuinely thoughtful decision. Pointer aiming maps cleanly onto a game built for one-finger touch, and the TV-scale visuals make the bullet trails legible from the couch in a way the phone version cannot match. For a Christmas-morning ten-minute fill while the kids work through their stockings, it does the job.
Free and ad-free is the right call for a game this disposable. Charging anything would have been the wrong move.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
There is no reason to play this in February. The Christmas skin is the only thing distinguishing Santa Blast from a dozen identical ball-shooters already in the LG Content Store, and once the season passes the novelty evaporates entirely. A second seasonal skin — Easter, Halloween, anything — would have given it a year-round shelf.
No high-score persistence between sessions on the units we checked, no leaderboard, no settings panel beyond mute. The lack of any retention scaffolding is the giveaway that this is a port done quickly, not a TV game built thoughtfully.
CONCLUSION
Install Santa Blast in the second week of December if you want a casual diversion the kids can play with the Magic Remote. Uninstall it on the second of January. Anyone looking for a TV game with depth should keep walking — this is wallpaper, not entertainment. Nothing wrong with that at the price, but set expectations accordingly.