Break down the walls. Escape. Repeat. Breakout Beyond turns the classic paddle and ball brick breaking game on its side. Now the paddle floats on the left side of the screen and with every broken brick, the wall juts to the left, as it’s chipped away, until a ball finally breaks through and escapes. The premise is still simple and excellent and the new programming by Bit.Trip devs Choice Provisons presents an aesthetically attractive and mechanically mixed new experience.

Here’s the catch: the game is clearly designed around Atari’s contemporary VCS console. Which is good design, harkening back to that of the original, as the VCS features the same retro single joystick with a locked-in spinner feature which allows it to behave like a paddle. On an Xbox controller, you just don’t get the same acuity with a joystick. You can adjust the paddle speed — it’s about the only accessibility option you get — but there’s no equivalent experience available on another console. This is good design, but may not be functionally helpful on another platform.

So, it’s also been just a couple years since a more straightforward reboot of Breakout. Breakout: Recharged (2022) is a more classically-oriented Breakout approach, developed alongside a slew of other revamps — Asteroids: Recharged, Centipede: Recharged, etc. etc.

Why you’ll want to pick up Breakout Beyond instead is pretty simple. It’s because it’s been designed around the concept of Breakout and not as a corporately mandated extension of all of Atari’s games.

Choice Provisions are also just trustworthy developers but their design comes with bespoke advantages and disadvantages. When you score a multi-ball power-up and all hell is breaking loose, as lines trace the balls and bricks explode into smithereens, it becomes hard, sometimes near impossible to really track the flight path of the balls and respond accordingly. Add that to the mechanical quirk of designing for a controller most players will not have access to, and most of your failures are probably going to have more to do with visual overdesign and mechanical awkwardness than your ability, and that’s not fun.

Weirdly, the difficult spikes just a few levels in. The third level may be one of the hardest in the game. You haven’t really grown accustomed to the mechanics yet, the level is stripped of power-ups, and it’s a heady increase in amount of bricks to clear it. This is an imbalance in design, but once you clear that level, you’re going to be game for anything ahead of you.

Breakout Beyond is ultimately a successful yet flawed update to the formula going way back to the 1970s. It shifts the design sideways but it’s still the same sort of brick breaking fun it’s always been. That’s what good about the old videogames. Good design endures through iteration.

6/10

Reviewed on Xbox