Blasterball 2: Revolution

Blasterball 2: Revolution is a remake of the arcade game Breakout. You have a screen filled with bricks of various types and colors, which must be destroyed with the ball you control with your paddle, in order to get to the next level.

The game starts with 3 lives, once you miss your last ball in the game, you loose a life. If you scoring enough points by breaking the bricks, you will be rewarded with an extra life. The same goes when you are lucky enough to catch one of those rare 1-UP-Power-Ups. With those lives, you play through two worlds, each filled with 100 levels. At every 20th level, you are facing a guardian, which blocks the next levels. The more guardians you face, the more powerful they are. Some guardians have self-defenses, which can destroy your paddle. The game has also bonus levels, which can be accessed by destroying the Secret-Brick. If you loose your final ball their, you don’t loose a life, but the secret level ends immediately.

Before the start of the game, you can choose from 4 difficulties, which will affect the base speed of your ball, from very slow to very fast. There is no possibility to save the game, but every 10 level you complete, you can access those from the New Game Menu, means you can start from level 1, level 11, level 21, and so on.

On the journey to the end of the game, you are facing 7 different brick types: normal bricks, the 2-hit brick, indestructible bricks, phantom bricks (which will reappear some seconds after their destruction), exploding bricks (which will destroy up to all 8 non-2-hit/indestructible bricks directly around that brick), the plague brick (it’s the opposite of the exploding brick, it don’t destroy, it spawns normal bricks), and the secret brick (when it appears, you have only a few seconds to destroy it, or it vanishes).

Once you destroy a brick, there is a chance it drops a power-up, some affect your ball, some affect your paddle, and others affect the surrounding. The following paddle-based power-ups are included in the game: mini, grow, laser (here you can destroy bricks with your paddle too), attach (the ball don’t bounce from the paddle), phantom (this provides a ghostly extension which follows you), twin (it divides your paddle into two paddles, but you move them like one); the ball-based power-ups are: slower, faster, divide (every ball gets splitted into 3 new balls), 8-ball (every ball “explodes” into 8 new balls), blasterball (the ball that gave the game it’s name; this red ball will destroy every brick in their way and will only bounce on the three walls and your paddle); the surrounding-affected-power-ups are: 1-UP (extra life), flash (destroys the critters), catcher (this will catch one ball you miss), 2x and 3x score multiplier (which are time based).

The paddle-based power-ups can’t be combined, so you can’t have a grown laser equipped paddle. But the ball- and surrounding-based power-ups are cumulative, so you can have a 4x multiplier by collecting two 2x multiplier, or you can collect a divide, making your ball into three balls, then you can collect an 8-ball, resulting in 24 balls on the screens, furthermore you can collect a blasterball, changing those 24 balls into blasterball.

The critters are enemies, which normally can only divert the ball in other directions when they explode after impact. Furthermore, you are able to smash them with your paddle, or kill them with your laser, if you have a laser. But they can also help you, since some of them can destroy bricks. Or they can hinder you, like the bricklayer, which morphs into a brick.