This is the second "Recharged" game I played (after Centipede), and I was surprised by how much both games follow the same formula, down to the game modes, UI, and even some power-ups.
Like Centipede: Recharged, Breakout: Recharged adds a few modern amenities to temper the unforgiving and, frankly, not particularly fun nature of the original. However, unlike Centipede, the final result here still still leaves much to be desired.
I really like the idea of "Challenge" mode, where the player is presented with a series of single-stage challenges (a TON of them, actually) with a specific goal (such as reaching a certain score or destroying a certain number of a specific brick type). In theory, this allows for imaginative level layouts that focus on learning the mechanics of specific power-ups, but in practice they either felt like all you had to do was keep the ball in play until the goal was reached, or they were [i]incredibly[/i] frustrating scenarios that depended heavily on trial and error until the player gets lucky.
I'll describe the worst offender: In one challenge, the player must destroy 50 armored bricks. Simple, right? Well, the brick layout descends by one brick every two seconds, and the moment one brick crosses into paddle territory, you lose. In order to destroy the bricks quickly, you must make use of the rail gun power-up to destroy columns of bricks, ideally lining yourself between two columns to take them both out simultaneously, while also freeing another rail gun power-up to do the same thing again for the next two columns, continuing to chain these power-ups until everything is clear. However, you must of course be able to keep your ball in play while doing this, and if your ball draws your attention away from a power-up, your odds of beating the challenge just got much worse. If you have to waste a rail gun shot because your ball was falling far from block columns, your odds got worse. If you can't start the power-up cycle quickly enough, the blocks get dangerously low and can bounced the ball erratically without giving you time to react. If you bounce the ball at a shallow angle so it takes a LONG time to bounce all the way up to the ceiling and all the way back down, you lose a ton of valuable time during which the blocks continue to descend. Now, all those quirks and annoyances could be forgiven if you just had to get a smooth rhythm going and avoid any mistakes until you cleared the screen. Here's the thing, though: You need to destroy 50 armored bricks, and there are only 10 on the screen at once. Once you clear a set of blocks, another set descends from the top of the screen and you need to pull off another miracle... five times in total. This elevates the challenge from a frustrating quirk to borderline malicious game design, and I almost gave the game a bad review based on this challenge alone.
But ultimately, even though some of the execution is clunky, even though it still seems incredibly difficult to actually aim where you want the ball to go, even though there is no way to adjust the analog stick's sensitivity and the paddle moves too jerkily, even though the power-up that shows the ball's trajectory seems to do more harm than good, even though the game is often frustrating to the point of being infuriating, I still kind of liked it. I enjoy seeing classic games get modernized, I enjoy funky color schemes and beat-heavy music, I enjoy challenges and achievements, and I enjoy re-visiting gaming history.
This is far from a great game, but it is not without its charm and it did provide some fun between the frustration.
