Anyone who owns or has played a 2600, Apple II, or pretty much any game machine that was out in the 70’s and early 80's will have played Breakout. You know, that Pong game for people without anyone to play Pong with. It’s inspired many, many games, and the latest incarnation is a budget DS title called Break 'em All. While it captures the feel of the original game, it doesn’t really have all of the staples of the original game at heart.
I realize there’s a chance some of you might not know what Breakout was, so I’ll explain. It’s the game that spawned all those “use the paddle to hit the ball that breaks the blocks on top of the screen” spin-offs (Arkanoid, Quester, Brick Breaker, Alleyway, etc.) that I’m sure you’ve come across at least once if you have any gaming experience at all. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about you should probably stop reading here, chances are this game isn’t for you.
The game itself is a Breakout clone with Arkanoid-esque power-ups that you get using a Gradius-inspired power-up system. You pick which power-ups you’ll get at the beginning of the game, and as you progress through the levels they get more powerful, making you want to wait until the time is perfect before you use them. It’s a creative system, but I found a lot of the power-ups to be on the “it's cool but you don’t really need it” side. Basically, they’re good to have, but nothing to write home about.
I’ve got to hand it to the developers for doing a really nice job with the variety of bricks you’ll see (ranging from the standard “disappear when you hit it once” type to much more difficult bricks that can only be destroyed from one angle, or if they’re hit a certain number of times, or can’t be destroyed at all, you get the idea) and the huge variety of layouts (over 3 million) are clever and keep things interesting.
The game also has several modes of play, such as Quest mode (which has you destroy a few walls before reaching a boss, which adds some nice variety to the repetitive gameplay) and Tokoton mode (which lets you play through randomized levels.) There’s some multiplayer in Quest mode, but the game doesn’t really do anything but compare scores at the end, as there isn’t a way for players to compete with each other. This is pretty much a useless feature since you could just compare your score to your friend’s when you were done playing anyway. There’s some actual versus play in Survival mode, where you move a block (which is surrounded by other blocks that protect you) around the screen and try to bounce the ball into the central blocks of the other players, but in all honesty the outcome seems to depend more on luck than skill.
The gameplay itself is solid, but sadly the controls leave something to be desired. You move your paddle back and forth with the stylus, which makes for easier control than I remember from the original (I could never get the hang of that dial thing for the original) but unfortunately the ball’s physics don’t work as well as they used to. For those of you who don’t remember, Breakout players used to control which way the ball went by catching it on different parts of the paddle (kind of like Pong, but if you’ve never played Breakout I doubt you've played Pong either). For example, the further left from the center of the paddle you hit the ball, the sharper the angle that it bounced up and to the left was. In Break ‘em All, the ball isn’t as easy to control, and when the ball starts bouncing up at sharp angles it’s very hard to get it to go straight again. This takes the focus away from strategic placement of your paddle and puts it more towards just catching the ball and hoping it goes where you want it to.
Warashi did a great job recreating the graphical feel of one of an 80’s/early 90’s arcade game. The graphics are minimal, but the type of people who’d be interested in a game like this wouldn’t be the type to pass up a game because of its graphics, so I’m not really going to make a big deal out of it.
Bottom Line:
In the end, Break ‘em All is a decent puzzle game that sadly falls short of what fans of the original Breakout will be expecting. The budget price makes it attractive and it's well worth the money if you absolutely must have Breakout for your DS. To be completely honest, even as a lover of classic games, I have to say that this isn’t the kind of game that’ll appeal to most people. Buy it if you must, but it’s not something you’ll want to run out and get.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 6.8 |
Posted: 2006-10-09 08:44:45 PST