14 DAY TRIAL // More than 30 years have gone by since the first Break Out game appeared as an arcade version. A long time has passed by since then, but new versions of it keep popping out from who knows where.
Ballrush Aqua follows the pattern set by the old Break Out game, there's no doubt about it, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a few new ideas being applied in the course of the play time. It will turn out as great news for real fans of this classic type of games and it shouldn't come as a surprise that they come in a rather large number.
Ballrush Aqua features 10 levels for normal difficulty and 10 more for the hard ones, all more soliciting than you'd expect. One thing which is new when compared to the classic arcade game is the fact that a level in not made of several distinct challenges to break all bricks and receive extra bonuses. It's rather a continuous level, made of several separate brick walls. You don't have to struggle to hit absolutely all bricks on the screen in order to break them, but rather create a path to the top of the screen.
Once the ball manages to reach the upper side of the screen, it advances to a new brick wall which asks for the same strategy up to the final puzzle. The good thing about this concept is that every time you lose the ball (and that has high chances of happening several times throughout gameplay) you don't lose a life or the game. All that happens is just an automatic regress to the previous brick wall. As a path towards the next wall has already been made, you can easily return to the previous position.
BallRush Aqua also comes with the Auto Pilot feature, which automatically takes over controls of the game once a specific bonus lands on the pad. I'm still undecided whether to take this as an advantage of the gameplay or not.
It comes as a major blessing when you've been continuously playing for several minutes, hours, days, depending on how addictive you've grown of BallRush Aqua. Still, as this does not happen in all cases, it's terribly frustrating to see how the Auto Pilot loses points which you would have surely managed to catch with the pad. After all, what you do yourself is best. Or not? The good thing about Auto Pilot is that you will never see it lose the ball, no matter how many lost bonuses this might mean.
BallRush Aqua proves to be quite boring sometimes, as some bricks have to be hit several times in order to break. Actually, until receiving a bonus, the ball just hits the walls of the mobile phone's display screen with a slow, almost sleep-inducing way.
Once you manage to get a fall-of-fire bonus or rocket launch one, bricks break much faster and the amount of bonuses starts pouring. The speed at which you have to handle even multiple balls at times and also try to earn as many points is bewildering.
The graphics of this game are quite evolved and feature mild, pleasant brick colors. The only problem might be the fact that the background features a repetitive pattern which sometimes distracts attention.
Moreover, keep in mind that the game is called BallRush Aqua. Because of this, the water pattern comes back throughout the entire game with waves, fishes and air bubbles. All these sometimes distract your attention, especially in the madness created when bonuses start pouring.
All in all, this is probably one of the best adaptations of the original Break Out game for mobile phones. The great graphics, excellent ball control and captivating play moments are sure to make it stand out from the overwhelming crowd of adaptations for this game concept.
A demo version of game is downloadable for seven different operating systems: Pocket PC, Smartphone, Palm OS, Symbian S60, Symbian S60 3rd Edition, UIQ and UIQ3.
