Color Break is an arcade game where you must hit the bouncing balls with your paddle. The balls are coloured red, green, blue and yellow and can only be hit when your paddle has changed to the respective colour by changing it with the buttons on the joypad. This may sound familiar as a similar idea was used in the WiiWare game Bit.Trip Beat.
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Graphics are very basic with a plain back background and plain coloured balls. I would have liked to see some better graphics effects more like its Wii counterpart. There is just one music track which is OK but soon gets repetitive. Sound effects are near non existent and can only be heard when your paddle hits a ball, this sound effect doesn’t sound quite right. Bit.Trip Beat generated the music from the ball hitting the paddle, it would have been nice to get some different sounds in Color Break.
There are three game modes available to play. Sequence mode allows you to play through an increasingly difficulty of patterns with a number of lives. Hardcore Sequence is the same but you only have one life and Survival sees you playing the game for as long as possible. All three modes starts on a basic pattern which you must play for a length of time and then a new pattern with increased difficulty follows. This repeats until you run out of lives.
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I found the game quite tricky to play, the main problem being that sometimes I am a bit heavy handed moving the paddle to the next ball which results in missing the ball, this is more my fault than the game though. But coupled with having to change paddle colour it sometimes got confusing when there was a rapid sequence of multiple colours. The patterns remain the same every time you play so you can learn the patterns but even then I struggled to make any good progress after repeated attempts.
While there is nothing majorly wrong with the game I feel that with some more thought this could be a great game. A Practice mode with a level selector would improve things a great deal and turn a frustrating game into something more fun as you can learn levels that you have completed in the main modes. This would help the game flow better and saves you having to repeat the levels each time just to get stuck on that tricky level you died on. It is because of this it loses out on the ‘one more go’ factor which can sometimes make or break a game.
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Color Break costs 80 :MSPoints: which is the right price. The twist on Bit.Trip Beat with the coloured balls is a good idea and makes the game more of a challenge but I think it may be a bit too much. If you enjoy a challenge then this will be an ideal purchase for you.
You can find out more about Color Break and download the trial or purchase the game here.
Competition Time!
This weeks competition is to win a code for Color Break. In order to enter, all you have to do is reply by posting a comment below and tell me your favourite colour, it is that simple!
Rules:
The deadline to submit your entry is Saturday 26th September at 23:59:59 BST. Please include your correct email address in the field as this will be used to contact you if you win, the email address is not shown to the public. Only one comment per person, multiple entries will be banned from this and future competitions. Anyone may enter but please remember the token may not be redeemable if Indie Games are not available in your country. The winner will be decided at random from all comments posted on this topic.
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