Day 92 - Idle Breakout

Fifty, Arcade, Nightmare Fuel · 31 Jul 2024

Sam’s Take:

Unless I’m forgetting one, this is the fifth idle game we’ve reviewed (Giraffe, 50, Pachinkremental, and Evolve). I’ve said before in our Pachinkremental review,

“There are only two things that separate the chickens from the REAL FUCKERS: Constant things to click on, and a whole lot of bright-ass colors”

By that metric, Idle Breakout passes with flying colors.

Idle Breakout and Pachinkremental do another thing I’d like to add to the list, which is having the original goal of the game become obsolete. At the start of Pachinkremental, you are placing balls carefully, hoping they land in the middle. By the end however, you have a million balls bouncing all over the place and there is no need to keep track anymore. It goes from a game of Pachinko and slowly morphs into a game of upgrades and exponential growths. Idle Breakout is the same. At first you watch the balls bounce, hoping they get trapped on top or in the middle of blocks, while you actively click on them. Now on my second monitor I’m finishing about three levels a second and had to turn off the graphics to even get the game to run at more than two frames per second.

There are some bells and whistles on this game too, including achievements. I was close to getting all achievements when I started this review, so I waited a bit and got the last one and was rewarded with my headphones being destroyed (I turned it down for the video but it’s still very loud, you have been warned):

My main gripe with this game is, unlike Pachinkremental, there is no end. You can keep starting over with higher multipliers using the prestige mechanic, but progression naturally slows down after a while and you end the game once the dopamine drip doesn’t hit your personal threshold, so you always leave on a mildly sour note.

All these paragraphs just to say, it’s another idle game. It’s flashy and eventually devolves into madness, which is what we’re looking for.

I played it in the background my whole work day, so I’m willing to consider it a success.

Recommend: If you’re into that

Replay Percentage Chance: 1%

Time Played: 8 Hours (kind of?)