This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Games With Balls, and One with Blasting. Additional details may be found in the original article.
The last three games in this week’s Gems are entirely different from one another. First is Gameloft’s Block Breaker Deluxe 2 ($2), sequel to an iPod Game we previously reviewed and liked.
Simply put, this game is Super Breakout on steroids, a completely action-intense breaking and shooting game that places the emphasis on having fun rather than precision. You can tell from stage to stage that Gameloft wants you to win, and that it wants you to have fun playing: it just shows in the sheer number of powerups and the level designs.
In keeping with the genre, you still roll your paddle from left to right on the bottom of the screen, reflecting a ball back at targets, but at some point after Block Breaker Deluxe 1, Gameloft found a way to transcend the game it was cloning—Taito’s Arkanoid—and become just a little crazy. There’s a yo-yo ball that springs back, a force field that traps the ball between two lines for easier control, and a missile launcher that appears if you just don’t seem to be able to finish the level quickly enough.
Boss encounters, with legitimately interesting bosses, take place at the end of every collection of stages, and all sorts of variations in the bricks—small ones, big ones, moving ones, dangerous ones—keep the normal levels interesting.
If anything is missing here, it’s more variation and detail in the background art, which unlike Super Breakout stays identical for multiple stages in a row; you won’t likely mind because of the very good included music, ever-changing brick patterns and pace of the action. Another reason not to mind is the $2 price, which is a fantastic value for a title with this caliber of content and longevity; a random level generator, unlocked mini-games, and two-player simultaneous mode keep the game interesting even after you’ve worked through the main quest mode. Block Breaker Deluxe 2 shows yet again why Gameloft is the iPhone OS’s most thoughtful and value-conscious game developer; we’d recommend it to almost anyone.
