When When i first got into game titles as a child, Nintendo and Sega weren't a blip around the radar for most of us yet. The name of the game was Atari, also it really was the name in games-well, unless you were one of those unfortunate kids whose parents stuck all of them with a Colecovision or Intellivision. For some time, Atari was so big a player that even movies like Blade Runner referenced the organization living and well far into the future.
Yet now, here in that future, Atari is a name that i am prepared to bet far more people don't know than do, unless it's from the t-shirt randomly found at Target or perhaps a pleather wallet relaxing in a dark corner of Hot Topic. Atari does exist today, but it is not the real Atari once formed by scrappy upstarts in Sunnyvale, California. The new Atari, so that they can see some return on the brands and properties it acquired the rights to, has released some incredibly ill-conceived, or at best misguided, products and software across its lifetime.
One incredibly large exception to that, however, continues to be the company's type of games released under the “Recharged” banner. The series kicked off in the summer of 2023 with Missile Command Recharged, an attractive and well-designed modern update to the classic 1980 arcade hit. Following that, we received Asteroids Recharged, Black Widow Recharged, and now this week, Breakout Recharged. I've been incredibly impressed with the line-up so far, because the developers focusing on these remakes-AdamVision Studios and Sneakybox-seem going to put a large amount of work into maintaining the core simplicity and addictiveness of the classic versions while crafting an up-to-date visual and aural design language shared across all the titles. The result has been experiences that does not only feel both familiar and fresh, but that also seem like part of the same family, instead of random remakes tossed out by a variety of studios that all have different ideas for how you can accomplish those goals. (I won't name names, but there's a particularly infamous retro-inspired undertaking currently happening that could really learn from what Atari does here.)
Unfortunately, while Breakout Recharged is the newest release within the series, I also think it's easily the weakest. The problem is, Breakout is a really hard sell in this modern era given its incredibly simplistic gameplay, and it has always been replaced by much more compelling offerings such as classics like Arkanoid or more modern genre entries like Wizorb. Whereas I'd argue the original versions of Missile Command, Black Widow, and Asteroids can still be enjoyable today, I can not the same for Breakout. The devs have certainly attempted to make things more interesting here, however i don't know if that effort went far enough.
Breakout Recharged's main mode is Arcade, which you can play either solo or in local co-op. Before you begin, you decide on from one of three modes: Recharged, in which you have only one life and also have use of power-ups; Classic, which offers three lives but no power-ups; and Classic Recharged, which gives both of you the life bump and also the special items. Arcade is always the same number of brick patterns, with the goal being to see just how long you can last, and how high of a score you can achieve, before losing all your lives. I've had plenty of fun within my time playing the Arcade mode, as I always enjoy a good score chase, but the lack of both graphical and brick pattern variety will surely wear thin after a while.
The game's other mode is Challenges, which has a lot to sink your teeth into when you are getting bored of attempts at high scores. The large list of challenges feature their own brick patterns, even though some are about reaching a particular score, others concentrate on clearing out all of the bricks, surviving for a set amount of time, or achieving other specific win conditions. The challenges are lots of fun, some of them are definitely difficult to complete, as well as them provides a leaderboard of some sort, which I always appreciate. Overall, the mode is a great accessory for the sport, however i do wish it'd get more tweaks to the interface, as it'd be nice to be able to actually observe how many locked challenges remain while you play. Because it is now, you're just type of completing missions without knowing just how much progress you have made or what awaits past the next few stages.
I don't really enjoy coming across as negative about Breakout Recharged, due to there being nothing deeply wrong in anything it does. It's a quality effort from teams who seem to genuinely care about making good games, and it does attempt to push the Breakout formula forward in certain areas-such as a roster of power-ups that feature abilities I am not sure I've ever observed in other brick-breaker games before.
It's just, as mentioned before, Breakout has always suffered as a series because of its simplicity, and more could happen to be done here. The bricks may take an incredibly very long time to visit down the screen, and once you clear one set out, there's a burglary the experience when nothing happens before the next set arrives. Why don't you give me the opportunity to adjust the sport speed and brick spawn rate, without just cranking in the speed on everything (such as the ball)? There are several really intense patterns within the Challenges mode, where things get hairy as bricks continually get near to the fail line. It would be nice also to believe that higher intensity in the Arcade mode must i want to.
Why not go the Japanese “caravan” route and have a mode specifically focused around a crazy quantity of bricks descending where I'm attempting to see how high a score I'm able to enter a set interval of time? Or what about a mode in which the brick patterns are totally random, so I never know what to anticipate? The argument might be that such a degree of extra effort wasn't put into the previous Recharged games, therefore it might feel weird to do so here-but again, I worry that Breakout, even updated, is just going to feel too simplistic for several people out there, even when compared to other “simplistic” classic games like Asteroids or Missile Command.
There are then additional areas where Breakout Recharged misses the objective. While it comes with a lot that is similar to its siblings, the game's artistic design just does not have exactly the same impact as those other releases, resulting in it being the least impressive on a graphical level. A minimum of on Switch, there's some occasional slowdown when a lot of visual effects are going on, which can be rough, as any delay in knowing in which the ball is can mean quick death. (Oh, and absolutely turn off screen shake right from the start.) Finally, and weirdly, you can't make use of the directional buttons to move your paddle, or even for navigating menus.
When I only say that Breakout Recharged may be the weakest of the Recharged series, I do so more from adoration for the work that's gone into these projects, and less as condemnation for this particular game. I've legitimately enjoyed my time with this particular latest offering, however i also must acknowledge that my experience may be the exception, not standard. If you have been curious about Atari's type of reworked classic arcade hits, then start with the other options already available. If you get through those three and still want more, or if you're a big enough fan of Breakout clones to wish to test a new undertake the sport that started it all, then I'd suggest you think about breaking out your wallet for any copy of Breakout Recharged.
