BreakQuest: Extra Evolution Review

If you have played video games since the Atari or ever owned a first-generation smartphone or Blackberry, more likely than not you have played a ball-and-paddle game similar to classic games like Arkanoid and Breakout (to which I’m sure BreakQuest’s title is an allusion). While this block-busting game type has proven itself to be a somewhat timeless bit of arcade fun, how well does a new entry in the series stand out today?

BreakQuest: Extra Evolution is a Playstation Mini, Sony’s mostly neglected answer to Xbox Live Indie Games and the iOS App Store. As such, it was mostly likely developed with Playstation Portable in mind but can be played on both Playstation 3 and Playstation Vita as well. I played the game on my Playstation 3.

If you’ve ever played another ball-and-paddle game, the basic mechanics of BreakQuest: Extra Evolution will be readily apparent to you. Each stage in the game requires the player to clear them off all blocks, circles or other shapes by hitting them enough times with a ball that is bounced off a paddle along the bottom of the screen. If the ball is not properly deflected the paddle and it goes off the bottom of the screen, the player loses a life. After hitting certain blocks or just over the course of time, power-ups and power-downs will appear and can be collected. Power-ups will extend the length of your paddle, the angle of its deflection, grant limited use lasers and missiles that can be used to destroy blocks or spawn additional balls. Power-downs will freeze the paddle in place, disable the range of deflection making the paddle considerably smaller and other similarly debilitating temporary mechanic changes.

Visually, BreakQuest is somewhat unique for a game of this type. Rather than simply featuring different geometric layouts of rectangular blocks, BreakQuest’s levels are a bit more organic, featuring flowers, life preserver-like inner tubes, ropes and other objects that act to impede the player’s access to certain blocks and deflect the ball in unusual ways. A few levels take this concept and run with it creating an environment free from any blocks until the player passes the ball through a certain point or requires the ball to hit a number of specific targets without hitting any of them more than once and deactivating them. These levels were the most interesting in the game, mixing a bit of puzzle mechanics to a standard, fairly boring base game.

With at least 100 levels including a number of boss fights in which the level acts to actively impede the player, BreakQuest includes a sizeable amount of content. Sadly, the aforementioned levels requiring a bit more finesse and with a bit of a puzzle aspect to them were too few and far between. In the end, the majority of levels offered by BreakQuest are nothing more than slightly unusually styled block layouts.

After getting about eight or nine levels into the game, I began to uncover a few additional mechanics that the game had failed to ever really introduce me to or even make readily apparent. The first is a pair of bars along the bottom of the screen that fill up over time. Hitting the corresponding shoulder buttons will then move these bars up at which point they begin to act as barriers that can be hit twice by the ball before disappearing and letting the ball fly past freely. Upon my discovery of this, the game became far easier than it already was, especially considering that secondary bars can be charged while the barriers are still up allowing you to immediately replace a barrier after it is cleared.

The second mechanic was much more unusual and I never came away from the game with a completely clear understanding of it. Through the collection of specific power-ups and possibly other ways, the player may collect “parts.” These parts look like quarter-pieces of a ball. After collecting four parts (which are only visible from the game’s pause screen), the player can cash them in for one new ball or essentially an extra life. It’s unusual to have a power-up that only displays on the pause menu, especially when considering that unless the player is constantly keeping up with the amount of parts he or she has by hitting pause, it is easily possible to hit a game over after depleting your lives despite having enough parts to cash in for another ball.

Unfortunately, nothing has been done to deal with this specific game type’s biggest flaw: the closer the player gets to the end of a level the less blocks there are to hit and therefore the more the player is just sitting and watching a ball fly through empty space. While some games attempt to alleviate this through a heavy use of laser power-ups or increased ball speed as the level drags on, BreakQuest does nothing in this department and as such, I spent about ten minutes at the end of each level just watching a ball slowly float through empty space, rarely even needing to move my paddle and redirect the ball. It reminded me of my least favorite aspect of ball-and-paddle games on a regular basis.

Overall, BreakQuest: Extra Evolution is a game you’ve probably played before and when you did, it was probably better. In a world full of Arkanoid and Breakout clones, a game looking to create a similar experience needs to stand about from the crowd either through visuals or gameplay, neither of which BreakQuest is every really able to pull off successfully. While boss fights act as a somewhat unique addition to the genre, BreakQuest is a less than ideally controlled, somewhat muddy package of a game we’ve all played countless times before.