Breaker : The

Copyright : Juliet Software | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Another clone of the famous bat and ball game hits the Amstrad CPC. Those that have played Arkanoid will no doubt recognise the game from the moment the tape stops playing, the rest of you must have been living underneath a cave not to know or recognise this style of computer game. Unlike Arkanoi there is no story line so to speak so lets just get on with the review.

Graphics

Breaker might inherit some ideas from the Arkanoid series (loading screen etc) but it certainly doesn?t do a very good job of cloning the graphics. First of all the backgrounds are plane black and don?t do much to stimulate the player, the level designs look as if they are ripped directly from Arkanoid but the gaming speed has been seriously decreased and the power-up/down system is blatantly ripped from the arcade classic.

There are some obvious problems with the collision detection because the ball will, at times, pass straight through your bat and knock one of your lives out. It also has a problem when when ever power-up/downs are dropped from the blocks as the game produces some hefty slow-down.

Sound

Sound is reasonable though again not as good as the Arkanoid games, we are treated to a pretty nice musical score at the front of the game which is proceeded by enough but not very active game sounds during play. Having said this it certainly beats the hell out of some other games in this genre and at least a reasonable attempt has been made.

Gameplay

Well the gameplay is pretty much the same as all the others, hit the ball at the bricks, try to collect the power-ups and don?t drop the ball down the hole at the bottom of the screen. The difficulty progresses from level to level but with the slow down bug (mentioned earlier) it will appear hard on the very first level for a brief period of time.

You can use the joystick or keyboard to play the game though we recommend the keyboard because you won?t end up breaking your precious joystick with anger when the games collision detection goes nutty.

We have seen a lot worse than this but it is not without problems and some might easily become frustrated by the slow speed and collision bugs.