Just Bricks Review | TheXboxHub

‘Simply Bricks’ sounds extra like one thing you’d stumble over in a B&Q than the Xbox Retailer. Maybe dropped at you by the individuals who made No Extra Nails and Ronseal. 

However ‘Simply Bricks’ is acceptable as a result of it gives nearly nothing greater than brick after brick after brick. It pulls up a wheelbarrow, pours some bricks onto your garden, and shrugs its shoulders once you ask the place the remainder of the sport is. We guess we had been warned. 

Simply Bricks is a Breakout clone. However a clone within the sense that it’s a brainless, soulless copy of the unique. You get a paddle (surprisingly giant, extremely sluggish), and a ball quickly glued to it. Then you definately’re urgent A to thrust the ball into the higher echelons of the display screen, the place it plinks in opposition to bricks, disappearing them, earlier than bouncing again to be handled. Then you definately’re bonking it again to the bricks, on the earth’s dullest tennis match. 

We’re being impolite, however we’re really Breakout followers. We’ve written a Prime 10 of them on the Xbox, so we’re clearly into the style. However none of them are as dreary as Simply Bricks. 

It ought to have been extra optimistic. There are 200 ranges right here, which is an astonishing quantity for the 79p outlay. We’d like to know the share of gamers who attain the top of the 200: we suspect you possibly can rely them on a few fingers. However the amount is excessive, which ought to be celebrated. 

Simply Bricks isn’t ugly, both. There’s a fundamental Tron-ness to the neon show, and it’s all somewhat clear and legible. We weren’t anticipating our breath to be taken away contemplating the style and the fee, so we met Simply Bricks midway and appreciated it for what it’s. 

There are power-ups, which we shouldn’t essentially take with no consideration. Since we’ve complained about its brutal simplicity, it might have dished up none in any respect. Regardless, there are solely two: one which turns you right into a wrecking ball, churning by way of bricks; and one other which will increase the scale of your paddle, which was already fairly girthy. They’re welcome: the wrecking ball specifically, because it makes brief work of ranges that may have in any other case taken an age. 

That mentioned, the wrecking ball does break a Breakout unwritten rule. Simply Bricks employs that outdated traditional, the unbreakable brick, so as to add some problem to proceedings. However the wrecking ball bounces off them somewhat than destroying them, which denies you the straightforward pleasure of destroying the undestroyable. Schoolboy error. 

However whereas they’re higher than nothing, the power-ups are fairly darn near nothing. We’re assured that a number of extra wouldn’t have taken lengthy to code, and we’d have taken them over the 200 ranges. Knock it right down to 100 and provides us a power-up that provides machine weapons to our paddle and we’d have been in Arkanoid heaven. The priorities are off right here.

When creating a Breakout clone, the topmost merchandise in your ‘To Do listing’ is to get the ball and paddle physics proper. With out them, you’re completed for. Sadly, Simply Bricks is completed for. As talked about, the paddle is an oil tanker, lengthy and unmaneuverable. When a ball can ricochet in a quick and unpredictable trend, it’s necessary to have the ability to react, and also you simply can’t in Simply Bricks. There’s no velocity power-up, no button to press for an elevated burst. You might be bumbling over to the ball and watching it because it falls away, flicking you the chook because it disappears into the ether. 

Simply Bricks is able to some physics-defying feats, too. It could really feel like you might be enjoying Air Hockey on a downhill tram, as wall-to-wall actions of the ball immediately begin bending upwards or downwards. We perceive that the participant most likely doesn’t need to await a sideways ball to come back to them, however immediately jostling it in a single route doesn’t reassure you concerning the recreation’s physics. 

The identical goes for some brick-bounces. Hitting a brick at an odd angle can imply an inauthentic ping into a very sudden route, leaving you together with your pants down and holding onto an ineffective paddle. Which no person needs. 

And if the controls are the very first thing to get proper, the degrees are the subsequent. And so they’re not good by a protracted shot. Simply Bricks has two instruments at its disposal: the widespread brick and the impassable brick that your ball simply bounces off. It’s not sufficient materials to create attention-grabbing ranges, and Simply Bricks wasn’t a lot of an artist anyway. Often, we received a House Invaders alien or a scene from Tetris, however more often than not they’re only a scree of bricks with no worth in how they’re positioned. With 200 ranges to pad out, you possibly can see the place the issue lies. 

Too usually Simply Bricks resorts to the unkillable brick, which is not any enjoyable. Bricks will be tucked behind them, or walled off, and it results in extended bounceathons the place you neglect once you final hit a brick. Linked to the poor physics, it’s extremely, numbingly tough to get any sort of angle on the ball: even if you happen to bounce it on the final pixel of your paddle, the ball will nonetheless drift at a slight angle. All you possibly can hope to do is catch a brick on its nook, which is the most effective likelihood of getting your ball to do the side-to-side. 

What you don’t need with a 200-level, no-achievement blandfest like Simply Bricks is to be lingering on nameless ranges, however there’s a hell of quite a lot of lingering. Because of the shortage of management over the ball, you will be looking at two or three bricks for as much as ten minutes. You get three lives per degree, which is greater than sufficient, however it solely prolongs the torture. Usually, your finest hope is {that a} wrecking ball power-up arrives, as a way to blast by way of the remaining bricks. However they received’t chew by way of the unbreakable ones, in fact.

We’re completely overrun by Breakout clones on the Xbox, and none of them are notably costly. It makes the gross sales pitch for Simply Bricks muted: 79p for 200 ranges is spectacular, however spend a few kilos extra and you may get a recreation that appears, performs and feels infinitely higher. 

Simply Bricks takes minimalism too far. A recreation of this sort wants greater than some bricks and a paddle. We’d have fortunately chucked in a number of quid for some further power-ups, achievements and a much less resounding feeling of boredom. However, then, it wouldn’t be ‘Simply’ Bricks, would it not?

You should purchase Simply Bricks from the Xbox Retailer