CV and Gambit's Retro Rad Review - Breakthru! (SNES)
Ah,
Alexey Pajitnov. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard that name. But, there’s an even better chance that you’ve played one of his games—or at least, a variation of it.
Alexey Pajitnov is the brilliant mind behind
Tetris.
Now, I’m not going to go into real detail about Pajitnov’s story. It’s pretty simple. Dude makes a game. His country takes it, saying that it belongs to the people. Dude doesn’t get any royalties for it, despite the fact that it’s one of the biggest puzzle games of all time. Now, that’s all changed. Pajitnov and his team get royalties now. But, they didn’t for years. Which is why we hate Communism SO MUCH!
Anyway, in 1991, after the Iron Curtain fell, Pajitnov and friends moved to America and opened their own studio, where they helped design new puzzle games.
Breakthru! from 1994, on the
SNES and
PC, is one of those games.
You’ve probably played something similar to this as well. You start out with a grid of multi-colored blocks. Click on two or more blocks of the same color, and they disappear. Any blocks above them fall, and after you destroy an entire vertical line, the two separate sides of the puzzle move together. Your goal is to clear the board of all blocks, revealing the rad picture behind it. (But, more on that later.)
Breakthru! sets itself apart from the later clones, however, with a number of really neat gameplay innovations. For starters, there are additional blocks, which shape things up. You have dynamite blocks, which destroy the eight blocks around it. You have other blocks, which can only be destroyed by dynamite. And you have multi-colored blocks, which destroy all blocks on the grid of a single color.
Another way the game sets itself apart is the slow crawl of blocks across the top. At any point, you can drop these blocks into gameplay to aid you or, most of the time, get a single block you need, leaving the rest of them to totally screw you up. This leaves the game play quite frantic, as you have to watch the top crawl for blocks you need, while you’re trying to find good combos down below to clear the board.
Now, it should be said, that this crawl of blocks isn’t just a tool to make the game easier. You see, they can also drop at any random time. And there’s some really, really frustrating about lining up the blocks to drop perfectly, and having them drop one step too soon.
In
Tetris, you spent the entire game fighting against the top of the screen. The speed of the blocks falling increased, the higher your score got. Losing was inevitable. The game was just a test to see how long you could keep going. In
Breakthru! your opponent is the clock. You have a certain amount of time to complete each level. If you don’t, you lose a life. After three lives, the game’s over.
By far, the most hilarious part of
Breakthru! would be
Alexey Pajitnov’s hatred of everyone in the world that has a wall. I’m not sure if there’s something political here, but the game is designed in a way that you’re actually “breaking through” walls. It starts out innocent enough. You break through the Berlin Wall for the first four levels. Awesome. However, once that’s done, you go to London and start destroying walls there. And then you go to San Francisco and destroy walls there. Then Moscow. Then New York. And finally, you take out the biggest wall of all… you go to Beijing and destroy The Great Wall of China.
Stupid walls.
And then, if that’s not enough, once you’re done with your worldwide path of destruction, the game levels basically start over and you do it all over again. Man, this guy HATES walls!
Alright, there’s probably a pretty simple reason for his design choice. And I’m sure there’s nothing sinister going on here. But, I can’t help but imagine Alexey, hunched over a computer, sweat pouring down his face, saying in his thick Russian accent, “Walls! More and more walls! Destroy them all!”
The graphics are decent for a puzzle game. Nothing to write home about. You have bright colors for the blocks, and behind each wall is a rocking picture, which changes depending on what particular wall you’re destroying.
(You know, in retrospect, all of the pictures have either people or vehicles behind them. Maybe, you’re letting people out. You’re a good guy… Maybe… Ah, who am I kidding? Those people are all probably watching this saying, “Dude, that’s not cool. I worked hard on that wall.”)
The sound is where it’s at, though. Each area of the world has its own theme song, and they are awesome. The
SNES has a terrific sound chip, and it really shines through in this game. The sound effects can get grating at times. But, they work.
The control is solid. No complaints.
The biggest problem I have with the game is really more of a personal one, coming from someone with the attention span of a two year old. The game tries to shake things up, but by like the twentieth level, I was getting really tired of the game. I started going through the motions, with no real strategy. I wasn’t looking for combos. I figured, if things got to the point where I couldn’t do anything else, some dynamite would crawl across the top of the screen and I’d just drop that.
There are ways you can make the gameplay a little different. In the options, you can set the time limit and the difficulty, which helps. But, you’re still playing the exact same game. Just with some extra things thrown in here and there.
I think the problem is that
Tetris is a very active game, if you can call it that. You build the board, as you go through. If you mess up, it’s your fault. You made a mistake. That keeps your mind engaged. In
Breakthru!, you’re dealing with the board the game creates for you. You’ve lost some of the control, and it just kind of feels like you’re going along for the ride.
There are three multi-player modes, which really add something to the game. So, I have to give them props for that. You have a cooperative mode, in which you both work to clear the board. You have a competitive mode, in which you both work on the same board, but with separate scores. And then you have a dual wall mode, in which you each have a gameboard, and your goal is to complete yours the fastest. I’ve never played with anyone before, but I can imagine that it can get pretty hectic, with plenty of classic
Dr. Mario “punch your opponent to throw him off balance” moments.
Overall,
Breakthru! a well-made puzzle game, that will provide you with quite a bit of enjoyment. However, the game does seem to get tired pretty quickly. And I’m not sure it will hold a lot of peoples’ interest for very long.
Breakthru's scores :
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Total score = 4.0
