BreakBlast Review (PC Game, 2020)
content warning: BreakBlast features bright, contrasting neon colors against a dark background. While the intensity of the effect can be minimized by lowering the graphic quality, you cannot alter the colors or remove some effects that are pretty close to flashing/strobing lights. Watch the trailer before buying to see if it is safe for you to play. The game does have an advisory warning.
BreakBlast is a new brick break-style game on PC. This genre of game traces its origins to Breakout, a 1976 game from Atari leveling up the mechanics of Pong.
You control a paddle on one side of the screen. The other side of the screen has rows of colored blocks. You bounce a ball back and forth between the paddle and the blocks, trying to clear them all out before your ball drops off the screen. Different levels have different patterns. The mechanics only grow from there.
I’m a big fan of this style of action/puzzle game. It’s a simple concept that is easy to pick up but has a surprising amount of depth. You just need to move a paddle left and right with your choice of keyboard or controller.
BreakBlast has some great features I really appreciate in game. For one thing, you can catch the ball on the side of the paddle. This is huge. Usually you need some kind of powerup or add-on to stop the ball from bouncing. Here, if you catch the ball on either side of the paddle, it stops moving. You get a deep beeping sound to let you know the ball stopped moving, but you get a chance to essentially pause the game without having to exit out to the menu. This lets you reevaluate the layout of the bricks and change your strategy.
How much strategy is there in this kind of game? It depends on the programming. BreakBlast is the particular style of brick break game I like. You can manipulate the angle of the ball with momentum. You can let the ball do what it does by just setting your paddle to hit it. You can also push the ball further to the left or right by moving the paddle into and beyond the place you need to hit it.
If you want the ball to hit further to the right, you slide the paddle from left to right while bouncing the ball; if you want to reverse the direction, you move the opposite direction the ball is landing from. You can’t set a precise angle of attack, but you can manipulate the ball to move closer to where you need it to with momentum.
The powerups are all useful in BreakBlast. That seems like an odd thing to say, but it is worth pointing out. There are games in this genre that have random features that just don’t do much to help your gameplay. I’ve played games with powerups that have the ball move in a spiral pattern or flip the paddle to a different side of the screen, literally making it so that you will miss your next shot.
The powerups here are simple, direct, and clearly coded. A white powerup gives you a multiball bonus, where your one ball splits into four that you can keep in play as long as you hit them with the paddle. A green powerup lets your ball travel straight through bricks instead of bouncing off them. An orange bonus gives you a pair of lasers you can shoot at bricks to destroy them while the ball is bouncing around. A blue power up doubles the width of the paddle. These are all useful and you control if you grab them or not. You have to catch the powerups as they drop from the brick, so you can pretty easily avoid swapping to another powerup if you don’t want to.
BreakBlast also has boss battles. This is a great feature that breaks up the pattern of gameplay in a brick break game. You have to figure out what the new rules are as the gameboard suddenly attacks back, moves around, and sets up new objectives. It’s a nice way to add challenge and keep the game from being too repetitive.
The best feature of BreakBlast is how forgiving it is. If you run out of lives in a game, you can continue from where you left off. It says restart, but it means you restart on the same level. Sure, you do not get to keep your point total, but you don’t have to go back to level one after making it past level 10. It’s just a considerate feature. The only thing to know is closing out the game loses that progress. This is NES rules: the game might let you keep moving forward, but it cannot save your progress once you shut down the system.
BreakBlast is a stylish and intuitive brick break game. Fans of the genre will find a lot to enjoy here.
BreakBlast is available on Steam.
