Reaxxion

Even if you’re a youngster you probably know this is called Arkanoid. It’s a really popular game from early 80’s, a classic brick-breaking game. And why am I mentioning it?

Well Reaxxion is a really good looking, new version of Arkanoid in short.

What is the whole game about? It’s simple, move a paddle right or left at the bottom of the screen, and keep a bouncing ball from touching the ground. To clear each screen, you must break all the colored bricks laid out in a specific pattern. In addition Reaxxion can handle mutliple balls, power-ups and much more.

Left click shoots out a ball (or multiple balls) that crash the blocks. By holding down the right mouse button you can suck the liquid of your ball and make your paddle grow. Shooting a ball makes your paddle smaller of course. The longer you hold the left mouse button, the bigger the ball will become and bigger balls are stronger and faster, clicking the left mouse rapidly create a lot of small balls.

Some bricks will drip metal after being destroyed, which you can collect with your paddle to grow bigger. But be careful because if it gets too big the paddle will become "unstable," and eventually will shrink down unless you fire some extra balls right away.

One of unique features are the glass tubes that can store your balls for you if you aim directly at them. And once you lock in three balls you’re rewarded with a multi-ball bonus, and suddenly your three small silver balls become five larger yellow balls (they do more damage and score everything x2). The glass tube on left changes your ball randomly into several power-ups (like it adds lasers to your paddle, gives you fire ball, magneto ball, frozen ball, force shield etc).

The bricks aren’t just colored bricks like in original game, they may be in shapes of electric guitars, spinning wheels or even a whale!

You have to defeat bosses after every 10 levels and by defeating them you will unlock another 10 levels. There are some special levels as well (you need to gather up some amount of points to get to them) and after completing them you usually get an extra life.

Summing up Reaxxion is a pure fun and a very good clone of the classic game, it has a lot of cool levels and offers a non-repetitive gameplay. The only thing that I didn’t like was a lack of bigger screen resolution (the maximum resolution in the game is 1024×768) – but you can easily play in windowed mode. The game also has a PANIC! button, so if your boss catches you playing this game just press "P" and he’ll never know ;)

Here’s a short gameplay video:

Overall Rating:

4/5