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The Daily Click ::. Downloads ::. Review Review: Unknown Game 2340
I was stuck for what to write about this game, but then the best word for it came to me, and that word was "odd". On the surface it's a fairly basic Breakout game - you know the idea. You control a bat at the bottom of the screen, and aim to keep a ball in the air hitting blocks for as long as possible. Occasionally a powerup drifts down from a destroyed block, providing a brief moment of indecision in which you attempt to get the powerup and the ball at the same time, inevitably with the result that the ball plunges to its doom. The power-ups, of which there are three, are Grow, Shrink and "Tri-Powerup". That last one allows you to shoot three bullets from your bat at a time, but it just floated through my bat when I got it on the first level. Could have been a one-off. It came in very handy on the second level, though. So why did I call it "odd"? Well, there are a number of reasons. First of all, only keyboard control is available. I've seen one other Breakout game with this before (Paranoid), but it really is better to have mouse movement as it allows quicker and more precise control of the paddle. The screen scrolls with the ball instead of having one static screen. Actually, this is quite a good idea as it allows levels to be bigger, but the ball is very slow and doesn't speed up, so you're often waiting for the ball to come down for a while. Of course, no Breakout game would be complete without a gimmick. Electronoid's was that it was set in a Star Trek mechanical environment. Bipbop added a deeply involved (well, not quite) plot. Krypton Egg's was that you were batting an egg made of krypton, and Gemstones III had the famously horrible music. In this case, you're batting a smiley face around, and you can press Space to rotate its movement a couple of directions anti-clockwise. You can only do it every so often, as dictated by the power bar on the bottom left (which doesn't scroll with the screen). It's a very strange idea and if you ask me it doesn't work very well - it wouldn't have harmed the game to allow both directions. The level designs are varied and interesting, graphics are drawn very well, but it's the basic game engine, and therefore the gameplay, that let this down the most. The main problem is that the ball is too slow, so finishing a level becomes tedious rather than enjoyable, and the steering, while a good idea, isn't very well executed. One last point - genuine help (.HLP) file comes with the game. True, when you call it up it comes up in a window the size of a postage stamp, but I don't often see this type of help file with Click games and it's always nice. The game doesn't recognise the file correctly - it looks for the wrong filename - but that's a minor problem thats solution is only a double click away.
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