The developer known as UnikGame has bounced back into the brick breaker genre with BrickQuest 2, which comes wrapped in a great package of gameplay, graphics and music. While it’s very much a retro game in essence, it also uses lots of ideas and tricks from other games of recent years to make the entire brick breaking affair a relaxing and entertaining experience.

You use a little spaceship as your bat to bounce a ball through 160 levels, divided into 16 worlds. The rules of the game are the usual simple ones: destroy all the normal bricks in the level to win, and don’t drop the ball below the bottom of the screen or you will lose a life. The variety of special power-ups you can get keeps things interesting, with laser blasters, flaming balls, ice balls, multiple balls and sticky goo that allows you to hold onto the ball until you want to launch it.

There’s a lot more than just the usual one-hit, two-hit and three-hit bricks to interact with in each level. There are the usual moving bricks and indestructible bricks, but there are also attractively designed platforms and walls, pottery and boxes that can be shattered to reveal more power-ups inside, stars and gems worth extra points, and many types of cute little creatures, monsters and ghosts, which you can “capture” by shooting at them after they get stunned by your ball. Capture enough of them and you unlock certain secret levels. Similarly, there are also captive creatures in cages that you can free. The only problem is that it’s entirely possible to miss some of these, and you can’t go back to any individual level after it’s over - you have to play through the entire world, all 10 levels, one after another, until you get the creatures you missed.

One particularly nice innovation in recent years has been the ability to skip a level once you’ve hit all but one or two bricks. BrickQuest 2 does this by dropping a power-up that you can catch to end the level, but allows you the choice of not catching it if you want to try to score more points or capture a collectible creature first. And this level-ending power-up keeps appearing repeatedly in case you missed it the first time around, but it’s optional every time - something that we liked a lot.

I have to give special mention to the sound design, which grabs you from the opening screen, when you hear the enchanting theme song sung by Marie-Christine Collet. The incidental music is very techno in feel, and it’s entertaining and varied enough that you’ll want to leave it on the whole time. The sound definitely outshines the graphics, despite the fact that this is also one of the prettier games we’ve seen in a while. All in all, BrickQuest 2 comes with a strong recommendation from Casual Review. Check it out now!

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(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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