Mondrian: Abstraction in Beauty (PC) Review

With the full name of Mondrian: Abstraction in Beauty, users are taken through the history of gaming, all while playing a game that honestly feels like filler. Despite its somewhat ridiculous name, it attempts to do a lot with the brick breaker genre. Unfortunately, for every step forward, it remains almost completely stagnant.
The game adds a simple twist to the formula, allowing the player to fully circle the bricks they are breaking. This should, in theory, add a great twist on the gameplay that defines the breaking of bricks that has spanned pretty much every console generation and countless PC iterations.

The gameplay is so slow, though - so painstakingly uninvolved - that it almost feels like a TellTale Games title. Despite the 360 degree movement path, and the somewhat novel idea of the borders of the playing field moving, very rarely does anything need to be done. In one game, the ball only had to be bounced twice, and it lasted about five minutes. The remainder of the time it just bounced around the play area, aimlessly destroying bricks. Mondrian also comes with a slew of technical problems.

On more than one occasion, when turning the game on, it would load to a white screen, and never proceed. Exiting and re-entering it fixed this, but it was still fairly annoying around the fifth time it happened. Also, the ball and the bricks don't always interact the same. Sometimes the ball will bounce off the bricks, and sometimes it will go through four or five before stopping. Couple this with other issues, like the wall not always moving, and the experience gets bogged down even further.

Progressing is a loose term, but it is there. The levels don't change up too much, but there are achievements that can be unlocked in order to progress. It's honestly a pretty weak system, because it really proves that the achievement system of Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation really couldn't hold up on their own.

The graphics start out looking good in the main menu, but once the game loads up, it honestly looks like it was made in MS Paint. While some of the backgrounds come from other titles, like Neverending Nightmares, this doesn't speak to the graphical quality of Mondrian. At the end of the day, this is minimalist to a fault.