Break 'Em All

Break 'Em All Review

Did you like Breakout back in the late '70s? How about Arkanoid in the '80s? Are you still playing some variation or another of these classic but aging titles? Then D3's Break 'Em All for the Nintendo DS ought to be like Christmas come early for you. Taking the classic block-breaking concept of the aforementioned games, and adding in some varying mode types and a Gradius-like power-up structure, Break 'Em All has some merit as an update to those classic games. But it also doesn't necessarily pull off everything it tries to do. The ball physics sometimes come across as rather haphazard, and most of the game's multiplayer functionality just isn't much fun at all. And for all its purported variety and depth in terms of available stages and puzzles, the lack of ball precision ultimately lends the game too much to chance, rather than actual strategy.

Though Break 'Em All comes with a simple, but oddly catchy soundtrack, just about every other aspect of its presentation is bland and, at times, downright ugly. The graphics are fully simplistic, with bare-minimum menu screens, dull-looking scrolling backgrounds, and some multicolored but same-looking blocks. Even the paddle and ball are exceedingly boring. The ball is almost too small to properly see at times, and the paddle is plain old ugly. None of the boss stages look impressive or all that intimidating, either. Beyond the soundtrack, all you get on the audio front are some tinny-sounding plinks and cracks of breaking blocks. Not very exciting.

Break 'Em All isn't an altogether bad update to the Breakout family of action puzzlers, but so little of it stands out as particularly interesting or unique that it's hard to really justify spending money on it, especially with so many superior puzzle titles already available for the DS. There are certainly worse ways to spend $20 for your DS, but there are considerably better ones too.

Gamespot