Quantcast
Review: Hyperballoid HD (PS3) | PSNStores

Review: Hyperballoid HD

Posted by on December 23rd, 2009 | 1 Comment | Tags: ,

Developer: iSquared Games
Release Date: December 10th, 2009
Price: £3.19 | €3.99
Demo: No
Players: 1

What I liked:

  • The game is fairly inexpensive.
  • Lots of interesting power-ups. The level warp can save you from having to clear all the bricks.
  • There are 100 levels and it is a game that most could just pick up and play.

What I disliked:

  • The music gets a little repetitive after a while. There are custom soundtracks though.
  • The game can get very boring while trying to clear those last few blocks you just can’t seem to get.
  • No leaderboards, but there are trophies.
  • Motion controls, if you chose to use them, don’t work all to well. They seem like they were just tacked on.

Everyone at one point in time has probably played a brick breaking game. The objective is simple, you have a paddle and a ball. You then use the paddle to bounce the ball into the bricks. Hyperballoid HD is just that, a classic take on what you remember brick breaking games to be.

This visuals in the game are nice to look at to say the least. The game can be played in 1080p and everything looks nice and crisp, especially the backgrounds. Be warned though, if you are playing in an SD resolution you may have a hard time reading the text in-game. There are a fair amount of power-ups in this game, so make sure you look at the help menu. It details every last one of them and there are some that you definitely want to avoid (the ones that make you lose a life D:<). The music also seems to fit well into the 100 worlds you will play through. But after a while, hearing the same few songs over and over again can bore you. Thankfully this game features custom soundtrack support.

The game also features support for some of the things offered by the PlayStation 3. You of course have trophies, which are fairly easy to collect in this game, the aforementioned custom soundtracks, and motion controls using the SixAxis controller. But beyond that there is nothing. I found it really odd that leaderboards were not in the game, because if you look at early screens you can see a highscore option on the main menu. In the copy we received from the European Store, that option was not available. Hopefully that will be patched in the future.

Not having highscores isn’t the only bummer with this game, at times it gets very tedious. The game will help you out a little by having warp power-up appear when you have most of the blocks cleared, but it is getting to that point which is the problem. There are many types of bricks in this game, most of which take multiple hits to clear. I spent probably on average about 7 to 10 minutes to clear stages towards the end of the game. Power-ups become few and far between so you are just stuck trying to bounce the ball into the bricks over and over and over again until you hopefully clear enough for the warp to appear. Some players may love that, but this game just is a little too oldschool for me.

If you were to just look at this game by itself, you would be hard pressed to find faults in it. The controls are responsive, it has good music (even though it gets repetitive), and there are tons of levels to play. There is also the price, it is really inexpensive which is always a plus. But then when you compare it to other games of a similar genre on PSN it doesn’t fare as well. Of all the brick breakers on PSN this one sticks the closest to the genre’s arcade roots. So I can really only recommend this game to you if you have someone in your house who only casually plays games or if you just really love to break bricks.

Click Here to purchase Hyperballoid HD from Amazon.com