Thanks to Atari for the review code
Title: Breakout Beyond
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 03/25/2025
Story
In this brick breaking adventure, you take control of paddle, who must hit a ball to escape out of bounds.
OK, this is Breakout. You aren’t gonna get a story in-game here, though there are neat nods to Atari history via the 72 stages and some cute touches that do lead to this being a mini celebration of Atari history. But what I do think is interesting enough to describe here, is the story of the game itself. See, this was originally a breakout game made by Choice Provisions, the team behind the excellent Bit Trip series, for the Intellivision Amico.
If you don’t know what that is, just know it’s a system a bunch of weird nerds got really fixated toward even as it became more and more apparent it was never gonna be market viable in the leadup to the first (missed) release date, and it absolutely will never be market viable in a post-tariff world. Still, in the midst of a ton of low budget looking games, three games looked to be actually really darn good, with Breakout being one of them.
Now Atari has salvaged the game, let Choice Provisions go in and finish it up, and we have ourselves the third take on breakout in five years. Is this just as fun as the other two throwbacks, or is this when the streak breaks for good? With Choice Provisions knowing their stuff, I was pretty excited going in, so hopefully that excitement kept as I played through the game.
Presentation
You have a pretty nice looking menu when starting up the game, and then a colorful level select in the vein of a breakout board. Nifty! Upon going into an actual level, you’ll find that unlike most breakout games, played from a vertical perspective, Beyond is shown in a horizontal point of view. This takes a little bit of time to adjust to, and honestly makes the game look more like a remix of Pong at first, but I was able to adjust to the orientation pretty quickly, and the game is incredibly scalable on the steam deck, too; the resolution looked pretty great on my 4K TV and the game didn’t really struggle while docked even with it scaled up all the way. Likewise, it looks perfectly fine in portable mode at 720p, and the colors just really do pop, especially if you have an OLED display.
So a pretty looking game. What about the soundtrack? Breakout Recharged had a pretty generic, if inoffensive OST, and Neo Breakout had something of a similar vein. Well, considering the original game had no OST, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Choice Provisions went for a more rhythmic, semi-limited soundtrack. Your ball creates a nice little beat when it makes a combo against the bricks, and the general ambience present throughout the game is just a nice touch overall, being the kind of relaxing ambience you’d put on before bed to relax and destress.
Gameplay
Breakout Beyond is well, Breakout. Played on its side, sure, but the main concept is the same as always. Bounce the ball, break bricks, and rack up points. Rather than the goal of each stage being to score a certain amount of points or clear all the bricks, the main point of Beyond’s stages is to literally break out of the wall of bricks and pierce through the final barrier at the end of each stage. This is done by slowly clearing enough bricks to move the bricks further to the left, and advancing ever so slowly to the goal while trying not to lose all your balls, and as you’d expect, you move the paddle to try and block your ball from doing so.
Interestingly enough, despite the Steam Deck being capable of trackpad support and working fine in plenty of other paddle games as a whole, the paddles didn’t seem to work for controlling the ball at all no matter how I configured it. I don’t know if this means you can’t use paddle controls on just the deck, or if the game as a whole doesn’t use paddle controls, but it did catch me off guard at first, especially considering the smoothness of the control for the other recent Breakout titles. Thankfully, the analog stick does a pretty decent job at controlling the paddle, and you can even use the R1/R2 buttons to speed up or slow down the paddle for even more precise aiming. While nothing ever beats a trackpad for me in these kinds of games, I at least found the button controls and analog stick sensitivity to work way better in Beyond than in the other recent games, so even if you play this on a console such as the Switch, you’ll be in good hands with these controls.
Otherwise, you do unlock a variety of handy powerups throughout your 72 stage quest. From a drill that pierces through bricks in one shot, to a barrier guarding the left side of the screen, along with many different explosion powerups, there’s some good variety to take advantage of within the stages, and upon clearing certain numbered levels, you’ll even unlock a powerup to add to any stage beyond the first few, meaning you can even go back to earlier levels you skipped or beat with a lower score, and take advantage of the unlocked powerups to make them a lot easier.
There’s also an endless mode that at first I was worried about due to it just abruptly ending at random, but that got swiftly patched in a recent update and works great now, even supporting online leaderboards and being a good way to still get the classic, non-stage based Breakout fun in. The main Voyage mode also got an online leaderboard update, now combining your total score across the 72 stages into a grand total, giving a lot more incentive to go back and replay those earlier stages with the unlocked powerups. So while the 72 stage journey may take you a good while and satisfy you just by clearing it, I was very pleased as a score chaser to see Voyage mode get online leaderboard support, and the game as a whole is just pure brick breaking fun.
Conclusion
Honestly after such a long development process I wasn’t even sure what Breakout Beyond would even feel like when all was said and done, but I’m real glad the final product is as satisfying to play as it should be. Sure, we may have gotten three breakout games in the past five years, but each of them have their own merits supporting the classic brick breaking gameplay loop, and I think of the three I prefer Beyond’s stage based structure the most. The little handcrafted layouts of each stage, the potential for combos and racking up points for the online leaderboards, and the calm vibe of the entire game just leads to a very fun package for Breakout fans.
I was even surprised they nailed the analog controls down as well as they did, even if I wished the Steam Deck would let me use the trackpad as a paddle controller. While Beyond may be pretty simple and a game you can jump into and know what to do right away, that doesn’t mean it can’t be some serious fun, and I found it to be a great and chill way to break some bricks while passing the time. Choice Provisions really did the concept great justice here!
I give Breakout Beyond an 8 out of 10.