Brickies

I adore this game. It’s so cute and fun but I wish I could just play the levels with the incredibly short timer. I’d much rather enjoy the levels than be racing a clock constantly. Other than super cute and fun.

The game works well however when I do the unlimited mode the game just bootloops.

I'm personally quite a fan of Breakout-like games, so when I saw this twist on the classic for free and with no in-app purchases, I was delighted. (I was surprised yet overjoyed by the lack of a Candy Crush-like lives system.) In addition, the art style is enjoyably simplistic and perhaps even cute, and I quite liked the music that plays during "boss" stages. (The level design, however good as it may be, felt like it was getting repetitive a short while into the game.) That overall positivity toward the game began to fade just a bit after a while, however, when I noticed the strange, erratic, and seemingly random difficulty spikes of the game. I enjoy a challenging game as much as the next person, but some levels made me say to myself, "What were they thinking?" Overall, I would say this game is quite good, but some oddly out of place and frustrating level design holds it back from being great. If you are a fan of Breakout-like games as I am, I'd say pick this one up. (Besides, it's free, so if you end up not liking it, it's not a waste of money.)

I wanted to love this game, I truly did. It has all the right elements going for it. An interesting hook on the genre (The player has a paddle at both the bottom and the top of the screen), a fantastic art style, solid music and sound effects, and it's pretty easy on the battery as well! Unfortunately, the game sort of falls apart in the mechanics department. Many of the surfaces in the game are angled or curved, which means that estimating trajectories can be somewhat difficult. But where the game really fails to impress is the paddle- which has an odd habit of reflecting the ball in random directions. On top of this, each level is timed. Some of these times are quite adequate, some are overly forgiving, and some are nearly impossible. I have always appreciated the meditative nature of the brick breaking game. Unfortunately, none of that managed to make it through the Brickies translation. Between the complete lack of precision controls and the poorly implemented timer, the game becomes more frustration than fun.

response required

I was excited to see this throwback design. I really liked these sorts of games when I was younger. Ultimately, this game disappoints. During the more challenging levels, you are often at the whims of chance in regards to which power-up appears and whether or not it is even possible to acquire. Many times, it pops up in locations that are completely inaccessible or impossible to get to due to the current obstacles. When you miss the ball, it can be devastating because it goes inactive. I know this can be mitigated with skill and practice, but it is so frustrating because the ball goes even slower. I say either make the penalty an inactive ball or a slow ball, but not both. Also, the ball frequently bounces nearly horizontal and takes forever to get back to the paddles and wastes tons of time doing so. If this happens when you have an inactive ball, there is no way to recover. When you fail a level, you can watch an ad to increase the time available to complete it, but this is something I refuse to do.