Sucking and blowing in a Breakout clone, huh?
Shatter is a critically-aclaimed Breakout-styled game, with some extra little additions, released by Sidhe on the PlayStation Store.
The idea of the game is quite simple. You've got a stage, add some bricks, essence of paddle, and a pinch of balls, and you have the basic premise of Breakout-style games. However what sepeates Shatter from the other brick-breaking games is that there are some additions here which can change the gameplay immensely. Firstly, you've got a "suck" and "blow" mechanic, which means you can, to some degree, control the ball once it bounces off your paddle. By blowing away from you, the ball can be somewhat turned to go back and break some more blocks. By sucking, you can bring both the ball, as well as some "blue orbs" towards you, which leads me to my second addition: The blue orbs allow you to charge up a meter, which allows you to get a machine gun of sorts out and shoot the hell out of all the bricks in your path.
The level design is satisfying. Levels alternate from horizontal, where you move left to right and hit the ball upwards, to vertical, where you move up and down and hit the ball to the right. All levels either are square or circular, though the game is the same either way. The aim is always to try to break all the bricks in the level without losing all your lives (which can prove to be quite tricky at times). There are a variety of different block types, from bombs, which will explode itself and any blocks around it on impact, and you've got the tougher blocks, which take 2 or 3 hits to break down. There's a bunch of different-looking ones, but for the most part they fall into one of these two categories of blocks.
Every now and again a special "coin" will fall out of one of the bricks you smash, which could be anything from another ball in case you lose one, double the energy for every block you break (as mentioned above, when you charge up enough energy, you can start shooting), and a coin that will double your multiplier (which does nothing but boost up your score, meaningless unless you want to get on the Leaderboards basically).
What can be quite annoying is when you have a bunch of blocks around you, and when they hit your paddle, you lose control for a few seconds. Add a ball flying towards you that you desperately need to hit back up, and you get the mother of all annoying in the world.
While the game is quite enjoyable, the story mode is quite short, and when you've completed that, all that's left is the Boss mode (which is essentially playing all the bosses all over again), and the bonus mode (which is playing three different bonus levels where you have three balls flying around that you've got to bounce around for as long as you can). All in all the extra game modes are quite pointless and don't add much more to the game.
The boss battles, which I just mentioned, are satisfying, but not quite challenging enough. Sure you might lose a few balls but more 1-ups keep on coming down which means you never "Game Over". You do get three of them in a world though, so if you game over at all in the world, you can continue up to three times from the beginning of the level you were on when you died, (at the sacrifice of losing your points) which can be quite helpful especially when you are quite far in the world.
Collectively Shatter is an enjoyable brick-breaker but it's quite short and there's not much more to do after your done with the story mode (which took me one day, I got the game in the morning, and had this review up the same night). The music is some sort of trance techno music which I absolutely cannot stand, yet there might be a market out there for that. It's a pretty basic modernization of the classic Breakout game, and for the price, you might want to buy it if you just want something to play for a little while. Other than that, it might not be for you, and you might want to look elsewhere for your brick-smashing fix.
