Lego Brick Breaker
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| LEGO Brick Breaker

Despite harbouring our fair share of the destructive tendencies of a pre-teen child, we found building Lego models to be tremendously enjoyable when we were little. Even more so than breaking them apart afterwards, in fact. Say what you will about male aggression – as a gender we love nothing more than to build stuff.

It's therefore with mixed emotions that we played Lego Brick Breaker, a take on the popular arcade classic Breakout featuring the little plastic bricks that boys and girls have grown up with for decades.

Built around the by now familiar mechanic of hitting a ball against a wall, it's up to you as a Lego heroine to free the population of the land who've been imprisoned by the evil king. To do so, you need to bat your ball against the Lego bricks that are arrayed around the screen and that enclose the trapped villager, so that they disappear. Hit the villager and he or she, too, disappears and is freed.

You get three balls with which to play. If you miss a returning ball and it falls off the bottom of the screen, you lose it. Thankfully, you can pick up more via the numerous power-ups that some of the bricks release when they're destroyed, as well as other benefits such as explosive balls, bat enlargements, guns and ball decelerators.

The evil king is a powerful man, though, and he makes his presence felt here, too. Understandably annoyed by your attempts to thwart his scheme, he's hidden curses in some of the bricks, which, if collected via your bat, will do anything from cost you a life to reverse your controls.

The stage is set, then, for 20-plus levels of Lego figure liberation that, you'll be relieved to hear, can at times be as much fun as playing with the real thing. The four themed zones that you work through in the Campaign mode might do nothing more than provide a different background and colour palette for the individual levels, but they do serve to deliver a feeling of progression.

Meanwhile, the end-of-zone fights with your nemesis, the king, offer further variation as well as a nice break from the otherwise singular objective of the other levels. Here, you simply need to knock the sovereign off his feet by destroying the bricks beneath him.

There's nothing too challenging in Lego Brick Breaker, though, and even these mid-game match-ups won't stretch the experienced pocket gamer. Mind you, this is a title that younger players can also enjoy without throwing a temper tantrum.

You won't be immune from getting a bit hot under the collar yourself, though, largely because of the slow pace of play (even with the ball speed power-up, the projectile is as sprightly as a surly five-year-old) and the lack of responsiveness in the movement of your bat.

Add to this the shortness of the game – you'll finish it in under two hours – and the diminished replay appeal due to a lack of incentives, and you'll come to the conclusion that Lego Brick Breaker is aimed squarely at the same audience as the plastic brick kits lining the shelves of your local toy emporium.

That's not in itself a criticism, but you should consider whether it's a satisfying long-term challenge or a dose of nostalgia you're after before shelling out on Lego Brick Breaker.

Lego Brick Breaker

Polished and enjoyably themed take on Breakout, but one that is sadly without the challenge or longevity of the original
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