Originally posted June 28th 2014. PS: The patch never came

Title: BrickBlast U (Also known as BBU!)

System: Nintendo Wii U (eShop, USA ONLY, will be released in Canada later on)

Price: 3.99

Release date: 6/26/2014

The main game/story

There’s no story so I’m not going to bother with this. But basically it’s a breakout clone, one of the first games of it’s kind to hit Wii U!

Graphics

The graphics look very simplistic… As if they were ripped from a N64 game. However, they get the job done, and the interface is very nice. The only problem I have is that sometimes in some levels it’s hard to tell which block is on what layer. Plus the Title screen wallpaper doesn’t seem to make sense, and reminds me of a Virtual Boy game.

Music and sound effects:

When you first start up the game you’ll be greated with a terrible title screen song that gets on your nerves very quickly. Luckily that’s the only bad song in the game, as the other songs fit the game very well, and the techno tracks are very good! The sound effects are standard, and they sound good for the most part. Even the announcer is surprisingly not annoying at all.

Gameplay

As mentioned earlier, this is a breakout clone. You move the paddle and hit the ball towards the bricks to destroy them. It seems simple, yet it has some neat powerup items that will help you out a lot, such as the laser and rockets, which are fired with the trigger buttons, the nuke item, items that give you more points or lives, small or large balls and paddles, and items that take away lives. It adds a lot of variety to the game and makes it fun to replay. Unfortunately the rockets have an awful habit of completely missing the blocks on the far right side of the screen, and getting two nukes in a row completely destroys the game’s balance. Overall, it plays well, but with some problems I’ll address in glitches.

Glitches

Sadly, this game is very buggy. They are minor bugs, but they’ll stack up and may make you not like this game that much. First off, the most major bug is the lack of Off TV play sound. This is a big missed opportunity as this is the PERFECT game to play on the gamepad, yet it only has sound on the TV… Luckily a patch is confirmed to be fixing this soon

The next major bug I had trouble with were the physics. Sometimes if I let the paddle stay still, no matter which way the ball was coming from, it would still bounce straight up! It would only change direction if the paddle itself was moving, and that’s a big problem that breaks the flow of the game, and should also be fixed in the upcoming patch.

With those two major bugs explained, now there are only minor bugs. One of them is that when you lose, you can sometimes still move your paddle, and collect items, yet they of course do nothing. Another is that repeatedly hitting the SELECT button on the title screen loops the high score theme, and the last one is that there is no support for attaching screenshots on the Miiverse community. With this in mind, it makes the leaderboards pointless as they are local only and not being able to share it on miiverse takes away potential replay value..

Conclusion

In the end, BrickBlast U is a decent attempt at making a breakout clone for the Wii U. Unfortunately due to technical glitches, it’s not quite there yet. Even with a patch coming, some things should have been there day one. Therefore, I give Brick Blast U a 5 out of 10 for now, and only recommended it for high score fans after the patch arrives. If the patch changes the game a lot, I’ll edit the score, but for now I only encourage getting it just to have fun by yourself.

Thanks to Nexis games for the review code.