Brick'em All (Nintendo DS) Review

This year marks the thirty-year anniversary of Breakout being released onto arcades everywhere by the then computing gods Atari and created by Nolan Bushnell. Thirty years on and the DS is playing host to yet another clone of that gaming classic in the form of Brick'em All, however mentioning it in the same paragraph as Breakout is simply not the done thing as BEA has virtually none of the magic or genius that made Breakout the enduring success it is.

BEA attempts to replicate the classic Breakout gameplay of using your paddle to bounce a ball against bricks at the top of the screen. Each time you hit a brick it smashes, clear the screen to win. Simple gameplay at it's best; surely just add power-ups, a few extra modes and versus play and you have a success on your hands. Well BEA does this, so how does it manage to fail?

Well, let's look at the single player aspect first. You have a choice of two modes if you are playing solo, namely tokoton mode and the obligatory quest mode. Tokoton is standard Breakout with countless stages to work through and the added "fun" of power-ups to aid you. The power-ups are chosen prior to play and unlocked gradually as you keep the ball in play. Within this mode you have the choice of playing through fifty set stages or going at three million randomly generated stages. Quest mode has you playing through twelve stages fighting through a mode that really needed even a generic narrative to give it some point. Each stage is split into two standard Breakout levels and a boss fight. The boss will have an obligatory weak point that you have to target with the ball.

One overriding emotion runs through both these modes, namely boredom. It manifests in a few forms, primarily the lack of speed and challenge within the game. Anyone who played Breakout or even one of the various clones on mobile phones these days will tell you of the frantic nature that quickly takes levels with 5+ balls bouncing around at a frantic pace and you being left zipping the paddle across the bottom of the screen. This is strangely absent from BEA with the ball bouncing like a geriatric on a trampoline even when the "fast" power-up is applied. As a result you can get behind EVERY stray ball as the speed of the paddle is adjusted accordingly. The game makes up for this oversight by having poor collision detection with the paddle and the ball so occasionally the ball will just slip through your defences. You also have the bizarre Quest mode, in which every boss has it's weak point identified to you on the top screen (so no problem solving) and infinite continues. That's right, no definitive game over screen. Doesn't matter though as there are no unlockable extras to get, so if you do somehow hit a level you can't complete I doubt you'll use your unlimited continues. After all, what's the incentive for working through those rare moments of frustration?

The multiplayer mode is strangely called survival and can be played with 8 players on the one cart. A rare plus point for BEA. Now this is possibly the most confusing multiplayer game on the DS with you and eight humans or computer players bouncing many balls around trying to get them to hit your opponent's life block. A few hits of this and you are out. Playing this feels like you are a spectator watching some sort of bizarre futuristic sport. There are so many balls flying around and so many opponents that skill is not possible, you'll fly around blindly trying just to survive instead of actually win a game.

Presentation is poor to say the least, the top screen is used to detail score info and boss weak points but frankly free flash games present score info with more style. The actual graphics do the job reasonably well, although there is zero style and even in a simple game should that be tolerated? Meteos could be called a "simple" game but is still beautiful as it uses minimum graphics but maximum style. The poor presentation is rounded off by some of the worst music heard belting through the DS's speakers. It's a shame that our DS had to put this music out when it could've been making us listen to the majesty of the Phoenix Wright soundtrack, or one of KK Sliders songs. Trashy vaguely Europop-ish dance tunes that wouldn't be accepted by even the worst Ibiza DJ accompany this strange little game, not that you'll hear many as you have a C3 guarantee that the volume will be lowered within 5 minutes of play.

The "Original Nintendo Seal of Quality" is on every game available for Nintendo consoles and is supposed to ensure that all games on Nintendo consoles meet a minimum quality threshold. This game should alert Nintendo that maybe they should actually start withdrawing this from some games as simply speaking it's baffling that a game as poor as this can sit next to the likes of Meteos in game shops across the globe. Pathetic gameplay, presentation and virtually zero replay value are just three of the problems littered throughout this shameful clone of that thirty-year-old classic.