Breakout of the mold!
You ever just wanna break stuff? Of course you have! We all have. That’s why we have Breakout and clones. Breakout was sort of based on Pong (the first commercially successful arcade game). Like if you flipped Pong on it’s side so it’s vertical, and like added bricks, and then removed a player, then you would have Breakout. Over the years it’s had it’s share of imitators, most notable being Arkanoid for the arcade. Arkanoid added several innovations in addition to actually adding graphics, it added things like dropping brick power-ups. You knew someone had to do it for XBLCG. Actually there is at least one more Breakout clone in community games. I’ll probably review that some other time. (Maybe I should have done both of them today, ahh well.) In any case this new one is called bricks4ever, yeah real creative name there, by Running Pixel. I guess if they’ve used all the names you can think of, you tend to grab for whatever will set you apart.
Okay so now, the game play. There are several modes of play, fast play, single play, and multi player. Fast play is just straight up play each level through. In single play there’s classic, Zen mode, 4ever mode and Bi-polar mode. Classic and Fast Play are nearly the same, except with Classic you can choose which stage you want to go to. Zen mode is interesting. There’s a barrier and randomly placed blocks moving down at a slow rate. When the bricks hit the barrier they disappear. You don’t really lose anything, you just have to see how many points you can rack up before its timer runs out. 4ever mode is similar to Zen mode except you have lives which you can lose, and the bricks don’t keep moving. Bi-Polar is really wacky, you have two paddles which you move with both thumb sticks. Kinda tricky that one. There’s even co-op with two controllers. There is also the obligatory shrink, sticky, enlarge, and multi-ball power-ups and others I have yet to experience.
It’s easy simply move your left thumb-stick or d-pad, except on Bi-Polar mode where you have to use both thumb sticks, and not the d-pad. The only issue is the thumb-stick is not very sensitive, and the d-pad is even worse. Too bad there’s no way to adjust it. Really paddle games are meant to be played by either mouse or a specific rotary control (like a paddle on the old Atari 2600). But that’s ok, that doesn’t stop these games from being made.
Okay so how about the graphics. Well you’ve probably read my past reviews, what kind of stuff do I like here? You guessed it GLOWY! So much in fact that if set at the highest setting it positively burns into your brain. There are 4 settings for glow. You can turn the background on or off, but other than that there isn’t much for options. The game runs at 1080p which is cool as most games especially CG games only run at 720p. The graphics are nice though with cool particle effects and others. The music is pretty good, not great, you can still tell it’s an amateur effort, but it’s pretty good for that
Final Analysis: Classic game play, with a twist, and tons of yummy, glowy, replayability.
Name: bricks4ever
Developer: Running Pixel
Price: 200 MSP / $2.50 USD
Where you can get it: Xbox Live Community Games on the Xbox 360
Tags: Breakout, fun, game, games, independent, Indie, retro styled, review, reviews, Running Pixel, xbla, xblig, xbox, xbox live, xbox live community games