We study numerically the evolution of perturbed Korteweg-de Vries solitons and of well localized initial data by the Novikov-Veselov (NV) equation at different levels of the 'energy' parameter E. We show that as |E| -> infinity, NV behaves, as expected, similarly to its formal limit, the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. However at intermediate regimes, i.e. when |E| is not very large, more varied scenarios are possible, in particular, blow-ups are observed. The mechanism of the blow-up is studied.