A breakout clone from 2007 with the added "bonus" of colourful screens at the end of each level depicting scantily clad women in a variety of erotic poses. The pictures are drawn rather than scanned and tend to vary in artistic quality from slightly wonky and cartoonish to reasonably detailed, given the obvious limitations of the speccy resolution and palette. Irrespective of this, the subject matter imposes assumptions about the target audience of the game and to me, there'll always be something fundamentally mismatched about including "lad mag" type pictures in an 8-bit retro bat'n' ball game, but "each to his own" of course!
Torn as I was between giving this game a score of one or two, I finally decided to be a little generous here because whatever you may think of the game, at least a reasonable amount of effort went into it, although sadly it appears only the tiniest proportion of it on the actual gameplay.
As for the game itself, it effectively turns the clock back three decades by ignoring all great improvements and additions that were collectively incorporated into the Breakout genre over the years. It is indeed difficult now not to miss these enhancements in a modern game if they are not there. Unlike Arkanoid or Krakout for example, this game seemingly has no features of note above those found in the 1976 original. For example, I've only played the first two levels but as far as I can tell, Chicks'n'Bricks has no power-ups whatsoever. Also, each level (on looking at the maps) looks pretty much the same with a solid rectangular array of wall-to-wall bricks and absolutely no variation apart from colour. There are also just too many rows of bricks on each level, taking ages to complete.
The bat has two speeds, slow and fast but unlike Krakout (and even my own one-liner Breakout clone) there is no key that the player can press to invoke the higher bat speed. Here, the bat just starts off slow and then after a second or so jolts to the fast speed automatically. You may well find that this method results in lives being lost at an alarming rate as the bat seems to annoyingly overshoot the ball a great deal of the time. But the biggest sin is that the ball can go right through the bat because of a familiar bug in the bat-ball collision detection. This is almost guaranteed to happen if the ball is moving at a shallow angle and your bat is moving in the opposite direction. There's nothing the unwitting player can do about this but sigh.
There's also another bug that I've seen before in the ball-brick collision, where the ball can penetrate and knock out an entire double row of bricks even though there is no gap between the two rows. But thankfully I'm glad this bug was left in because it actually helps the player complete the level more quickly. Overall it's quite an ordeal to actually finish a level due to the above problems and one that will usually end in failure and frustration at the awkwardness of the bat and unfair collision detection of the game.
So in summary this is a poor game-playing experience, married to a questionable concept. Just complete level six if you have a few hours to spare for you will be rewarded with some red nipple pixels, if that's your thing. (Or look at all of the pics via the "maps" in the worldofspectrum archives and save yourself the hassle).
Not logged in [ log in | sign up | forgot password? ]