Hands on with Super Breakout on mobile

If you had to depict 'video games' during a game of Pictionary, chances are you'd draw a paddle and a ball. Along with the moon-faced Pac-Man, the shuffling Space Invaders, and the enraged Donkey Kong, Breakout's paddles, blocks, and balls constitute one of video gaming's most familiar and iconic images.

And the formula's showing no signs of losing its appeal, with clones still appearing on mobile, iPod, and most recently on Nokia's N-Gage platform.

Glu's Super Breakout is no clone, however. It's a brand new sequel to Atari's epochal arcade blockbuster, and Glu was kind enough to let us have a play ahead of its release in early May.

As is customary in retro gaming circles, there's both a Classic mode, which allows you to play the game as it originally was, and an Evolution mode, which brings new power-ups and block types to the party. The graphics are also spruced up, but not dramatically: there are more colours, but nothing so fancy as 3D sprites, and even in Evolution it looks fairly vintage.

Anyway, there are five phases, each of which contains ten levels and a scattering of bonus stages. Apparently, you should also expect secret levels, unlockable with hidden keys, although we didn't manage to reach them.

Power-ups include the Tri-ball, which expectedly adds two more balls to the screen, and sticky paddle, which, yes, makes your paddle sticky. This is a common power-up, but in Super Breakout you can roll the stuck ball back and forth, aiming at whatever part of the screen you like.

Certain bricks also have magical properties that cause them to behave strangely when you hit them with a ball. Chain Reactions make neighbouring bricks explode, Switches activate or deactivate blocker bricks, opening and closing up areas of the screen, and Painters turn the ball a certain colour, with the consequence that it can only smash other blocks of the same hue.

These features are new and not new, if you know what I mean. In terms of things like physics and power-ups, Super Breakout doesn't play very differently from the other bat 'n' ball games out there, but the design is both exuberant and faithful to the feel of the original. In other words, it's retro done well.

If you prefer vintage to retro, the Classic mode offers a fairly comprehensive alternative to the flashing lights of Evolution, decked out as it is with simple blocks of colour on a black background.

There's a Standard game, in which you just have to clear the screen; Cavity, in which there are extra balls imprisoned in gaps in the blocks; Progressive, in which the blocks slowly descend; and Double, where you have two paddles and two balls.

There are also 'cheats,' a prospect as interesting as it is dishonest. Alas, we didn't get to cheat during our time with Super Breakout, but rest assured we'll let you know exactly what this scandalous feature entails in our forthcoming review.

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