Brickochet

DX Ball 2 with some new power-ups. Mechanics perfect, if you like breakout games, this is the old school standard.

A fun DX-Ball clone. The only downside is no saved progress (however you can choose any level after unlocking it). I just like playing arkanoids in short bursts, playing 50 levels in one session is a bit of a task.

Given the high praise this game has among non-Shatter brick breakers on Steam I was surprised at how little I enjoyed it. It is a very straightforward Breakout/Arkanoid-style game as it says, but I think it falls for a lot of the issues this genre can fall prey to. Despite the listed playtime I gave this game until just shy of the refund window, and tried all three level sets. The levels are huge and the assets are small, so you often need to stack a bunch of power ups to clear the level in a decent amount of time, and yet negative power ups and the Slow.Luck power ups appear quite often, on top of power ups that are technically good but only affect certain types of bricks that are often outright absent. Negative power ups, including the instant death, can often fall directly in the area where you'd need to put your bat to catch the ball. Even then I felt as though the hitboxes at the very ends of the bat were a bit off, and attempting to bank a wide shot just had it barely fly through the bat's sprite to the dead zone. It didn't help that the visuals are as bog-standard as possible, the music isn't very good, and half of the levels I saw were just drawing pictures with the bricks and not anything resembling an interesting level design. The power ups themselves can be very fun to stack, like the classic shmup-style power alongside the Big Ball, 4-Way Multiball, Pass-Through, and Burst. The fact that these can all be active at once and can decimate a level if they are is fun, but this kind of thing only happened twice across dozens of levels/lives in my time. Brickochet is a very clean, very pure brick breaker, but when games in the genre that give you more agency and engaging mechanics, or have better audiovisual feedback, some of which released years earlier or are also on Steam (Shatter being the gold standard and in both of those categories), I can't recommend it unless you're fiending for this genre. 4/10