BreakQuest Review (Minis)

     I just finished BreakQuest tonight, and I am ready to play its sequel, BreakQuest Extra Evolution, immediately. After playing Wizorb, I thought I was done with the breakout/ arkanoid genre (in case you don't know, these are those games where you bounce a ball off bricks at the top of the screen and then as the ball comes down, you bounce it back up to the bricks with a paddle. You want to break all the bricks without the ball getting past the paddle at the bottom of the screen). Wizorb was fun, but quite frustrating too. I now think that I may have been frustrated with Wizorb because it was trying to bring order and meaning to breakout mechanics, which are by nature random and uncontrollable. BreakQuest takes the total opposite approach by embracing and enhancing the breakout genre's inherent chaos.

     BreakQuest is a breakout style game with 100 levels. Each level is totally different. When you beat a level and move on to the next one, you never know what it's going to load up. Some levels have standard bricks arranged in patterns. Others have weird shapes that take many hits to break and bounce all over the screen when hit. Some of objects that need to be hit in order. Some have blocks that change colors and won't disappear until you match all of the blocks in a row. Some levels resemble other games, like Space Invaders,  complete with aliens that shoot at you, causing your ship to freeze up if they hit you. In my opinion, seeing what the next level is going to be is the main draw of this game. Just like I mentioned in my El Shaddai review, it's an amazing thing for a game to be so full of surprises that you never know what you're going to see and do in the next level.

     There are also a bunch of quirks and tweaks to the standard breakout gameplay. First off, you can press L1 to activate a strong gravitational pull on the ball. This is limited by a meter that refills for each new ball. This allows you to try to steer the ball into things below it. It's pretty ingenious as it gives you some control over the ball's flight path, but it is very inexact. I would use it every few stages to try and hit obstacles when the opportunity arose. It's hard, and succeeding feels like an accomplishment. This technique is so difficult and situations where you can use it come up so infrequently that it really adds to the chaos of the situation rather than make it more controllable (this is a compliment). It's not like you can steer the ball; that would be a design mistake. It's more like a semi-useful power-up that is always ready to go.

     Speaking of power-ups, there are a ton of them. Looking through the instruction book, I count 60. You read that right. Many of these are good. Many of these are bad. Some of them aren't really an advantage or a disadvantage, they just change things. There are good things, like barriers that catch the ball if you miss it and a power-up that launches 3 extra balls at once (and yes, this does stack if you get more than 1!). There are bad ones, like ones that make the ball's pattern erratic or mess with the controls of your ship. There are many types weapons that let your ship directly fire on the bricks and objects in the level, such as homing missiles and a spread gun. There are power-ups that change the shape of the ball and the bumper on your ship, or change the size of the bumper. And there are many, many others. The combination of 100 unique stages and 60 power-ups really made me feel like I ended up in some unique situations that no one else probably experienced, especially out of control scenarios with many, many balls on screen, some with their own orbiting ball enhancements! The addition of negative power-ups that need to be avoided is a great choice. Often you have to make the agonizing decision to fly through a bad power-up in order to save the ball. This hurts, and goes against your instincts, but losing a ball is a big deal, so you end up having to deal with these negative effects. Power-ups often end up interacting with objects in the level and getting knocked around by the ball, so that great item you're waiting for might keep getting juggled just out of reach, or a bad item might come flying at you as it gets knocked around.

     The d-pad or left analog stick lets you move your ship left and right. Holding square makes you go faster. Cross fires any weapon you might have equipped, and also re-launches the ball when you die and re-spawn. Triangle let's you launch your second ball (each life has two balls). Launching the reserve ball is typically too chaotic to control since juggling multiple balls is really hard (just like in real life), but is great for finishing off a final piece in a level, as you can try to line up your launch. The game also smartly spawns free weapon power-ups toward the end of levels to help you finish up the last few bricks or objects on the screen.

     The music is really cool. It's done by Maniacs of Noise, a group that works on sound effects and music for games and movies and stuff. The game's tunes are all a little different than typical video game music, but in a weird, good sort of way. Unfortunately there is a weird glitch (design choice?) that slowly turns the music down as you play until it disappears completely. Since you can't access the options screen to turn it back up during gameplay, I made many trips back to the main menu to turn it back up since it is really enjoyable. It's a very weird thing. I really want to know if it's a glitch or if they did it on purpose. Either way, it was really annoying to have to keep doing that when I was getting into a rhythm.

     Another little flaw (in my opinion) is the way the ball can sometimes slide down along your bumper and get past you even though you hit it. I feel like if you hit it, it should not get past you. This may be a design choice or a bit of a glitch, hard to tell. This happened to me quite a bit, although not enough to be a major issue.

     The graphics are really cool. Like many minis, there's a different look to it than your typical 2d HD game. And that's a very good thing. There are some really visually stunning effects, such as pieces that explode into confetti or bright colors when hit. Even when you smash many blocks at once and the screen fills with beautiful particles, there's no slow down (well, maybe I saw a hint of it once...)

     There's actually a little story to this game if you read through the digital instruction booklet (accessed on the XMB while you are playing the game). You are piloting a ship to try and shut down all tv signals because they are detrimental to humanity. Something like that. It's accompanied by several weird drawings, and I found it very amusing. Definetly some truth to the idea that tv is ruining humanity (a message given to you, ironically, through your tv). Even a few words and drawings like that can add a sense of purpose and coherency to an arcade style game like this as your imagination fills in the gaps of what you are experiencing.

     Once you beat all 100 levels, there is hard mode to try (actually you can pick easy, normal, or hard from the beginning), as well as arcade mode, which let's you pick from a list of game settings and play random levels. I never tried hard mode, as normal mode is pretty hard (I only ever got to 4th place on the high score table in normal mode), and playing the same levels over in order wouldn't have the magic of having something you've never seen before pop up in each new stage. I played with arcade mode for a few minutes after I beat the game. There are a few easier settings, and a few harder settings in this mode. There is Armageddon Mode, and Master Mode, which are both super hard in different ways. There is Fast! mode, my personal favorite, where the ball is super fast. You either beat the stage or die in an amazingly short time. I like the idea of having multiple modes that are hard in different ways. I'd like to see some other games in different genres have modes like that. Imagine an FPS or action game with difficulty modes like "Bad guys all have great guns but are slow," or "bad guys are super fast, but have normal guns." It's fun to see what random stage you get in arcade mode, but I what I really wanted was more new stages. That's why I'm going to play the sequel. I feel like I could play it right now, but I'll probably wait a bit.

     Despite how much I like Wizorb, my frustration with it made me think I would avoid breakout games from now on. After playing BreakQuest, my interest in the genre has been resurrected. I talked about it's limitations in my Wizorb review, but BreakQuest has show me that by embracing the chaos and randomness inherent in the genre, there is still a lot of fun and innovation to be had. I am now planning on playing BreakQuest Extra Evolution and Magic Ball. And if Wizorb 2 comes out, I'd be willing to give that a go too. I just hope its developers have learned a bit from playing BreakQuest. It's a great game, tier 2.