Thanks to RCMADIAX for the review code

Title:
System: Wii U (eShop)
Price: $1.49
Release date: 6/30/2016

The main game/story

In another simplistic title from this publisher, you stop aliens that look like they were kicked out of Woah Dave by bouncing a ball at them. In other words, a game that plays pretty much like Breakout or Alleyway.

Graphics

Outside of a fancy logo for the title screen, there’s not much to mention outside of what you’ll see in the game itself. Woah Dave similarities aside, the game retains a rather simplistic art style, with the characters in the form of squares and really not much else to talk about.

Music and Sound

Once again, a forgettable theme that loops. This time around though the sound effects sound and work as they expect, with a boop whenever you hit the ball or an enemy. Next section!

Gameplay

At its core, Invanoid is a breakout clone, a genre that while fun and hard to mess up, still can have a few flaws that make the game drag out, and Invanoid is no different. To start off, the moment you boot up the game and gain control of your paddle, you’ll notice that he slides around a lot. Hold down left or right on the D-Pad for even a second and he’ll slide a bit before stopping. This seems like something that you can adjust to before long, but unfortunately that never ends up to be the case. Game sessions would end as quickly as they begun, with me missing the ball due to sliding all around and not stopping on a dime, resorting to having to wiggle the D-Pad between left and right just to get the character to stay anything close to still. Outside of that major issue with the controls, you pretty much just hit the enemies with the ball to knock them out and get a point for each hit. No major powerups, no cool types of enemies, nothing. Considering how slippery the controls are anyway, it’s likely you won’t even see anything interesting and it’ll be a miracle to break my high score of 9.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Invanoid is a disappointing game. For a breakout clone, I was hoping it would still achieve the simplistic arcade feel that makes you eager to aim for higher scores and do a better job in general. Unfortunately, the odd slippery movement and the lack of any variety makes this game difficult to recommend unless you don’t mind those features in this kind of game. For anyone else even remotely interested in the game, wait for an inevitable sale or bundle.

I give Invanoid a 3 out of 10, only recommending it to folks who get it in either a sale or an inevitable compilation that includes the game.