Brickochet

A classic brick-breaking game, with some power-ups and such.

I used to have this game on my television in 2010. Very enjoyable game and can actually be more difficult than it looks. Some achievements are very hard to get. 9/10

Brickochet is a clean, classic-style brick-breaker with solid paddle controls and power-ups. Unfortunately, it suffers from common genre issues: oversized levels, tiny assets, too-frequent negative power-ups (sometimes dropped right where you'd need to hit the ball), and uninspired visuals and music. Many levels are just pixel art with bricks rather than thoughtful designs. While it’s not a bad game, it feels generic and underpolished, especially compared to stronger alternatives like Shatter. Great mechanics buried under mediocre execution.

Given the high praise this game has among non-Shatter brick breakers on Steam I was surprised at how little I enjoyed it. It is a very straightforward Breakout/Arkanoid-style game as it says, but I think it falls for a lot of the issues this genre can fall prey to. Despite the listed playtime I gave this game until just shy of the refund window, and tried all three level sets. The levels are huge and the assets are small, so you often need to stack a bunch of power ups to clear the level in a decent amount of time, and yet negative power ups and the Slow.Luck power ups appear quite often, on top of power ups that are technically good but only affect certain types of bricks that are often outright absent. Negative power ups, including the instant death, can often fall directly in the area where you'd need to put your bat to catch the ball. Even then I felt as though the hitboxes at the very ends of the bat were a bit off, and attempting to bank a wide shot just had it barely fly through the bat's sprite to the dead zone. It didn't help that the visuals are as bog-standard as possible, the music isn't very good, and half of the levels I saw were just drawing pictures with the bricks and not anything resembling an interesting level design. The power ups themselves can be very fun to stack, like the classic shmup-style power alongside the Big Ball, 4-Way Multiball, Pass-Through, and Burst. The fact that these can all be active at once and can decimate a level if they are is fun, but this kind of thing only happened twice across dozens of levels/lives in my time. Brickochet is a very clean, very pure brick breaker, but when games in the genre that give you more agency and engaging mechanics, or have better audiovisual feedback, some of which released years earlier or are also on Steam (Shatter being the gold standard and in both of those categories), I can't recommend it unless you're fiending for this genre. 4/10

This game is fantastic for the price. I was looking for an inexpensive breakout style game to scratch that nostalgia itch and this was perfect. The power ups and power downs keep it interesting, there are different blocks (they don't all just take one hit to remove, etc.), and the bar at the bottom was very responsive to my movements. There's also a level select, and once you've reached a level, you can start from any level you've seen before, so you don't have to start from scratch every time you lose. I have zero complaints about this game.

A brick breaker without too many weird things. Straight to the action with cool level designs and power ups!

You bounce balls off of colored bricks laid out in patterns. 500/10 monkey brain approved :D