Arkanoid Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

Aargh... take this game away from me. The most addictive game we've played in a while

Breakout was one of the first games that inspired us to create Mobile Game Faqs. The game looked great but as is so often the case it played like poo. Thankfully Taito and Kasaa bring back Arkanoid from the depths of retro heaven. Admittedly, the version of Breakout we played was back on our Motorola T720 and cant really be compared to the 6600 but Arkanoid has everything you could want.

The basic concept of breaking bricks with your trusty paddle and ball has been brought to us in many different games but Arkanoid was one of the first to have 'special features' that you can find in newer games like Ricochet (also coming to mobile soon). Multiballs, safety fences and laser paddles can all be found. The only trouble is that you cannot use all the power ups at the same time. If you've got a multiball in action and want to pick up the laser power up you will find your multiballs disappear and that's something nobody wants.

The layouts for the levels are good and gently increase the difficulty as you progress through the game. The levels themselves can get tricky if you don't get a move on; the more the ball bounces around the faster it travels. One of the limitations with the mobile screen is its size and this impacts on the number of angles for the ball to bounce around. Consequently, this does mean you will see some of the bounce patterns recurring. Luckily, even if you do get the ball stuck in a bouncing loop, the game does recognise this and change trajectories to get the ball out of an infinite bounce (a feature that was sorely lacking in Breakout).

Arkanoid has at least 50 levels, we are currently cursing over level 53. Even with 3 lives, completing this level requires a fair amount of luck and we can only guess how lucky you need to be to finish the entire game. The gameplay is highly addictive and we've found ourselves playing this at every available moment.