Well, there isn?t too much of a plotline here. Basically, your friends are kidnapped by the evil Crusher, and you are jailed. Of course, you gotta ?break out? and rescue them. So begins your quest. Good thing you are a little stick man. Let?s just hope you have the balls to do this. The first levels were what I expected. Very old school
Breakout, with a training guide named Mr. Steel helping you learn the necessary moves and such. Then there were other levels that were kind of strange and quite a stretch for the whole
Breakout theme. In one, you have to run from a wolf hot on your tail. Your character runs towards the screen and you maneuver him down the road, avoiding the wolf and picking up balls to hurl backwards, slowing down Mr. Wolf. How bizarre. Then in one of the Farm levels, you are in a chicken barn with rows of various chickens, roosters and baby chicks advancing on you Space Invaders style and hurling eggs, and it?s up to you to repel them with their own eggs. Ok, whatever. And then there?s the sheep round-up level. Just don?t ask. But it?s all good stuff. The Castle level also has such wackiness as fire-breathing dragons to roast your paddle, and irritating knights to get in the way of your ball. It?s all very amusing and well done.
Everything I have mentioned so far was on the Single-Player mode, but there?s also Multiplayer fun to be had in Breakout. Battle a friend side-by-side, as you break through scads of blocks which keep reappearing as you progress. Without an instruction book, I really couldn?t figure out what the final goal was, besides just breaking the blocks, because it seemed that each one had limitless balls (so you didn?t lose when you missed a ball) and bricks would reappear after you had broken them. Then all of a sudden, one of us ?won.? It was still good fun and there were interesting twists such as in the Space level, where when one player managed to clear enough blocks to hit the back wall of their area, a rocket was launched to fry the other players paddle. When this happens (as with the fire-breathing dragon), the paddle roasts and slows down considerably for a few seconds. Now this is damn irritating when your opponent keeps hitting the same spot over and over and launches countless rockets at you, but eh.
One odd thing to note is this. I started playing a multiplayer game by myself just to see what the levels looked like. The opponent?s ball launched on its own after a few seconds and kept hitting the same spot repeatedly and I was able to ?play? by myself for quite some time. I am talking like 10 minutes, without the ball missing the paddle. Seemed to me something should have caused the ball to fly off in a different direction, but more on that later.
