Brickzors

Atari’s brick-busting classic Breakout doesn’t get as much shine as Tetris, Pac-Man, and other old skool titles, but it should be added to the shortlist of the most cloned video games ever.

Like Pong, it’s simple: use a long bar to bat a ball towards a bunch of bricks. Brickzors doesn’t try to hide its classic Breakout heritage, but it doesn’t do a lot to update the formula, either.

In Brickzors, a level is done when all the bricks are gone. Traditional physics apply here: tapping the ball with the corner of your bar will create a different trajectory from hitting it with the center of the bard. Your finger controls the bar at the bottom of the screen.

There are two wrinkles to the well-worn concept. First, while the initial stage has bricks neatly lined up, later stages have the bricks creating unusually challenging patterns like 'U's and upside-down 'V's.

Secondly, colour comes into play. A white brick will disappear after one hit, while a blue brick may take two hits. The emphasis here is on ball control over speed.

Brickzors has an additional mode, Precision, where the ball cycles colours and can only destroy a brick of the same colour.

Brickzors's old skool gameplay is matched by its rough visuals. We’re talking Atari 2600 fat pixels and equally traditional bleeps and bloops. It looks rough in this new millennium, even with the classic premise.

Aesthetics aside, Brickzors has some control issues. The finger-based control scheme makes it difficult to do accurate hits because, well, your finger gets in the way. The menu screen also required multiple taps to register a selection, particularly on the iPad. The iPhone version overall seemed much tighter and responsive.