I love arkanoids; been playing them since the very first breakout was released by Atari on one of those arcade consoles way back in 1976. They even had those table consoles in my local pub, where you could sit down while drinking your poison of choice and play the game.
Arkanoid/breakouts have come a long way since those early days. I remember when Taito's Arkanoid (1986) and the sequels Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh (1987) and later on the brilliant Arkanoid: Doh it Again (1997), which for many years was my favourite arkanoid, were released, and over the intervening years I must have spent a small fortune on the ones in the arcades. That love of breakouts has remained with me ever since, so I bought Arkanoid smoking without bothering to read any reviews, because it was only £0.43 while on sale. That's not even the price of a bar of Cadbury's milk chocolate or a third of a cup of coffee from a cheap coffee house; so, on booting it up, I was immediately struck by its appalling game play. I'd lost a life before I'd even got chance to move my bat and the movement of the matchstick that doubles as a ball was not as I'd expect in a breakout. Within a few moments I'd lost all my lives which is unusual for me because I consider myself very proficient with breakouts, having played hundreds of them over the years for probably thousands of hours.
So, I rebooted the game only to find the game had defaulted back to its native developers language (Russian) and always does when you close the game down. There is a button that says English in the main menu, so I clicked on that to change the Russian menu to back to English; booted up the game and once I got used to the movement of the bat, easily flew through several levels; disappointingly with no power-ups in sight. The game play was extremely boring and lack lustre with no innovative ideas added for originality or improving the game play experience and the level designs were virtually the same throughout the levels I played. The original breakout was much better than this and that was very basic compared to most decent breakout/arkanoids available today. (you can pick up those early arkanoids via abandonware sites, but will need emulators for most of them to work.
I thought that Hardnoid which I reviewed some months ago [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/Whiterabbit01/recommended/574850/][b]HERE[/b][/url] was the worst breakout game I'd ever played, but Arkanoid Smoking is even worse and would crown it one of the worst arkanoids ever released on Steam.
I cannot understand why Valve allow such cheap and nasty games into their Steam Store. Most of these £0.79p games that Steam sell are not worth even installing. Shame on Valve for allowing such garbage to be sold here.
