Ever since the "Indie Explosion" of games on Steam, I've been attracted to Breakout Clones - games that mimicked Breakout and Arkanoid "paddle and ball" style games but a with a new twist. While I was only marginally entertained at best by these games as a child, these new variants of the genre have been alot of fun for me. Ironically, probably the worst one I've played of these is the official Breakout recharged.
Drawkanoid is another one of these games - a name that channels the spirit of Arkanoid plus the ability to redraw your paddle. I'd say the game is a bit more akin to Shatter, as the bricks have physical properties causing them to float around the board if they are loose or come in the form of bullets being shot from a sort of turret brick that shoots out bricks similar to patterns seen in bullet Hell games. In Arkanoid, you slid a paddle at the bottom of the screen to bounce a ball up towards bricks which could randomly drop power ups. In Drawkanoid, you use the mouse to draw a paddle in a field at the bottom the screen. When the ball returns to this area, you have limited time in slow motion to draw a paddle to redeflect the ball back to the bricks. Instead of power ups being dropped, you can start a run with a loadout of up to 3 power ups depending on which ones you bought prior to the run.
The run based nature of the game, combined with buying upgrades between runs and random brick layouts on each stage gives Drawkanoid a rogue-lite vibe, especially with the fact that your persistent progression is in the form of currency dropped from certain bricks or situations, allowing you to buy upgrades and power ups at the end of a run. Power ups include the ability to penetrate more bricks, the ability to aim directly at a specific brick, or draw a path for the ball the follow. Other upgrades allow for situations that give you more currency or lives.
My top issue with Arkanoid in my limited time is that the presentation is both great but also distracting. The use of vibrant, neon colors and sparkling effects are a treat to the eyes, but a distraction to gameplay, especially in later levels when your time to draw the paddle before slow motion ends is drastically reduced. By the time you reach levels 5-7, you have very little time before the extremely fast moving ball bounces out of control, and sometimes, depending on where the ball bounces, it would have left sparks, trails, and a beam of light surrounding it, making it hard to see where the ball is, let alone where it is going as you try to find a good spot to draw your next paddle. Many times, I couldn't see the ball and by the time I could, it was too late. Worse off, certain trajectories make the ball bounce at a angle that is hard to guess where it will bounce too, causing you to draw the paddle in the wrong place and lose precious, very limited lives. Sure, feel free to argue "Skill issue" here - getting better at the game will make this less a problem. But it does effectively mean you will play about to the same point over and over again to grind for currency to get upgrades like more lives, which get dramatically more expensive per upgrade.
If you like Breakout clones, Drawkanoid is very fun and scratches that itch, but expect to play an indefinite amount of runs before you have a chance to beat it.
