So when it comes to your reboots and remakes, which do you prefer? Is it the balls-out HD snazzy re-skin with additional game modes that either make or considerably break the experience? Or would you rather the understated glory of a former titan replicated pixel-for-pixel with all the antiquity that entails?
Breakout Boost is neither. It’s a sort of halfway-house between old and new, with a couple of features pulled from the evolved versions of Atari’s classic and a smidgen of thought gone into producing art assets that look at least look crisp on an iPad screen. It’s a freemium experience bolstered with cheap add-on packs (currently 0.69p each and offering up a wealth of content), leaderboards for the competition fiends, and little else in the way of bells or whistles.
With 35 years worth of progression between this and the likes of Peggle, it’s no wonder that things seem ponderously slow at first. Indeed Breakout Boost’s only real concession to modernity comes in the form of a game speed slider that allows players to alter difficulty and scoring on the fly, but even at top whack it’s manageable for the fanatics. And whilst we’ve been treated to all manner of neon vector-themed visuals and whizz-bang colours burning the retina in other retro ports, Breakout Boost keeps things low-key and clean. With a striped background and understated colours it wouldn’t look out of place in an 80’s bedroom or emblazoned on an Argos quilt from the same era.
It is however as addictive and mesmerising as ever, and at the end of the day you probably know Breakout - you’ve more than likely already played it in numerous forms - and the core gameplay is still just as good in 2011 as it was in 1976. Whether or not that’s enough to pique your interest in an ocean full of free iOS games and retro updates is entirely down to personal taste, but even without a particularly inspired roster of visual or gameplay tweaks, Breakout Boost proved to be a suitably entertaining diversion on a trip abroad last week.
