Magical Brickout Preview

There’s certainly no shortage of Breakout clones out there: it’s a simple concept that a lot of people have put their spin on over the years. From Peggle to Wizorb, everyone has tried something new with the idea from 1976. That brings us to Magical Brickout, and a rather nauseating gimmick: instead of moving a paddle or the ball, you rotate the level.

This is potentially a great idea, but the execution lets it down. The ball starts in the middle of the level, and always goes upwards when you start, and while you can rotate the level to aim the ball it can be rather limited, especially if you’re looking for the angle precision you can get from Peggle. It also bounces oddly, particularly if you’re moving the blocks it’s hitting at the time, and this caused me to lose a lot of balls. A lot of the time, I found the ball sailing towards the edge of the arena with literally nothing that I could do to stop it.

The levels are laid out very similarly to Peggle, with a number of blocks that are required to win: some that are meant to buff the ball, some that are meant to debuff it, and then the rest to fill out a design only adding to score. That design is representative of the background art - the same as many Peggle levels - but because you rotate the levels these often lose all sense of meaning within seconds. The background art itself is hand-drawn and one of my favourite parts of the game: each illustration is beautifully rendered and adds to the rather flimsy story.

Rescue the Fairies, Beware of the Dragon, Kill the Evil Wizard, Play Pinball

As with Wizorb, Magical Brickout features an actual story, one which is on-going through updates to the game every few months. The story centres around saving fairies which have been trapped in blocks, and is separated into themes, each consisting of a half dozen levels set around one environment. At the end of each section, there’s a “boss fight” which is just another level with a character snarling face as the backdrop.

There are two bars that fill up during play: the one on the left is the only way to get additional balls, and the one on the right is a score multiplier. Both fill up with successive block hits, and are much easier to fill on the first ball since the levels are usually very densely packed. The skill in Magical Brickout comes from trying to fill up the bars when the levels are more sparse because in some of the levels I’ve needed eight or nine balls, and you only start with five.

Magical Brickout takes the very simple Breakout concept and, in an attempt to put a new spin on it, makes a confusing mess. The balls physics never added up in my head, and I found some of the levels frustratingly difficult. There are two more level packs to come before launch, but the core gameplay made me feel nauseated trying to predict where the ball was going to go so I’ll probably have to give them a miss.