BrickShooter Review

I firmly believe that if you are to market a piece of software as a game, it needs to have three things.

1. Presentable User Interface (this includes HUDs, overall graphics, fonts used, etc)

2. Enjoyability - The game needs to be easy enough to quickly get familiar with it, but challenging enough to keep you frustrated as the levels progress.

3. A dynamic (or several) in the gameplay that pulls you out of the grinding you're doing and rewards you for your effort.

Here's how this game failed in all aspects.

1.
There is no real set "feel" to this game. It almost seems like there might be with all of the boxy sprites and fonts, but then you have this circular stop watch / color counter that is completely out of place. Even the board is meant to look jagged.

In terms of the graphics, they look like they're a straight palette from MS-PAINT. Not to mention, the game contains incredibly simplistic and unpolished graphics. However, this would have been acceptable to me as long as it would have followed the theme to the finish line. Unfortunately, the over stylized stop watch throws me off kilter.

The coup de grace to the interface is the fact that it runs maximized. Sorry, but that's straight out of the 90s DOS days. I can't tolerate it being used any longer.

2.
This game is not easy to pick up. Honestly, I really didn't spend a whole lot of time even trying. The first few levels should not require a casual gamer (and this genre is touted as casual gaming) to lose 4+ times on the first level before getting it right.

Put simply enough, it just never grabs you because you don't feel like you're doing any good at it. Everything you try just seems like lucky strokes.

3.
Where's the power-ups? Where's the incentive to actually keep playing? It's the same boring unchanging screen the entire time. Take other games of this genre. Even something as simply as Tetris has the concept of "tetris" (which is, of course, 4 lines at once). When it happens, the screen flashes realy fast and you feel like you did a great job.

This game is just rote. With redundant gaming like this, I suspect that even if it was easy (as detailed in "2"), it still wouldn't hook people very long.