Glaive: Brick Breaker

Genre: Arcade Brick Breaker

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Glaive: Brick Breaker is an Arcade-style game where you’re using a paddle to bounce balls off of bricks you’re trying to break, much like Breakout, Alleyway, and Arkanoid. Arkanoid is probably the most directly comparable game one could point to here, with Glaive having similarly-styled power-ups. So since this is a concept that’s been done to death by now, the question becomes one of execution: how well does this game deliver on the concept?

Frustratingly, the answer to that question is “it’s all over the place”. Pretty much every part of this game I can point to has something I really like and something I hate, and it’s all tied together in a sloppy way that makes the whole package seem half-baked.

The graphics, for example, look decent enough. They’re clean and do what they need to do. However, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of internal consistency to the game, with some backgrounds looking like wall panels for some reason while others look like a holiday-themed snowscape… and among it all the paddle we’re moving is supposedly some sort of spaceship?

The game has a ton of options, including a level builder mode, which is nice. However, the levels the game came with vary wildly in quality and challenge level – one early level had a narrow vertical shaft in the middle that was the only way to get to the breakable blocks on top, meaning that if you missed it or if the ball came back down, it’s almost certain that you’ll be losing that ball before getting it back up.

However, the worst offender here has to be the game’s physics, which are just broken. Normally with this sort of game, the direction the ball bounces is based partly on its prior angle, and partly on where on your paddle it hits. In this game, that rule seems outright discarded. In fact, not only can you never really predict where your ball will bounce, but if you try to change its direction by hitting it with the corner of your paddle, you’re more likely to send it careening straight down into the gutter for some reason.

And that’s really the killer here. As much as Glaive: Brick Breaker has a mix of good and bad qualities, the terrible ball physics in a game about hitting a ball makes the one thing this game is actually about one of its worst qualities. Don’t bother with this one.

tl;dr – Glaive: Brick Breaker is an Arcade-style brick breaker game that’s basically an Arkanoid clone. It’s not without its good qualities, but it is deeply flawed, including terrible ball physics, which kinda’ defeats the point of this sort of game. As it stands, this game is too broken to really enjoy.

Grade: D

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