Breakout Beyond literally turns Breakout on its side for a stylish take on the classic brick breaker. At the helm is Choice Provisions, the people best known for the BIT.TRIP games. It’s unfortunately style over substance, as it is missing a few core components, and a bug that prevents the infinite mode from being endless. That said, Breakout Beyond is still a good experience for new and returning players of the classic Atari game.
Similar to a more recent game like Shatter, this is horizontal Breakout. And no, there’s no TATE mode for you to turn your monitor sideways for a more traditional experience, but it would be really cool. It’s a game meant to be played left to right this time, and it really grew on me.
This is still Breakout at its core, with brick breaking being the name of the game. Voyage mode takes you through 72 challenging levels, you’ll spend around five to six hours breaking through walls like the Kool-Aid Man at a strongman competition. There’s many winks and nods to other Atari classics with the shapes of the bricks to break through, and is an authentic experience even with the new bells and whistles.
This is a three-button game: there’s paddle movement, sprint for accelerating paddle movement, and focus to slow down time. Paddle movement is so finicky and imprecise. I felt that no matter how high or low I dialed the sensitivity, it never felt “right” to me. Additionally, the sprint button went largely unused as it exacerbated the paddle movement. This leaves focus, something I had to rely heavily on because of how few hits it takes for the balls to reach their maximum velocity and you can’t reliably move the paddle in time. I wish I didn’t have to use focus so much, but in doing so, became a much more enjoyable game.
I like that if I have the ball bounce off the pad while moving it, this means the ball will curve like a bullet from “Wanted”. Successive hits will match the beat of the music. The music for the most part is quiet, subdued, and ambient. It only ratchets up when the intensity and combos are high, but that’s few and far between, making the soundtrack feel like an afterthought.
As you progress through the levels, you will unlock power-ups that will appear in subsequent levels. You’ll unlock various bomb types, a barrier that will protect balls (especially during a multi-ball scenario) from flying off-screen, drills, and bullets for major damage to get through the bricks easier, and in satisfying ways.
There’s two additional modes beyond the “Voyage” career. There’s Endless Mode, which gets unlocked after you complete the main campaign of 72 levels. Only here can you find a leaderboard to compare yourself to others, something that should be present on the individual levels, but isn’t. In playing the Endless Mode, it’s anything but infinite. Due to a bug the developers have acknowledged, it should not have an end, but isn’t fixed as of yet. Then there’s 1976 mode for the classic arcade experience for the purists.
Breakout Beyond has a really good aesthetic. It’s very pretty with a convincing CRT look, even on an ultrawide monitor. The curve can be distracting though, and there’s no way to turn it off. The options screen is bare bones, the only graphics option is to set the resolution, and that’s it. I wish there was granularity to what visual effects could be enabled at a time to tailor your experience.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Breakout Beyond doesn’t go beyond anything we haven’t seen before. It has its issues with paddle sensitivity and endless mode not being infinite, but both of which can be fixed in updates or patches. NeoBreakout by Digital Eclipse or any of the other games within Atari 50 collection do offer a more complete experience. Breakout Beyond is still a solid Breakout experience, in a pretty package to justify its own existence with a style and visual flair the series has deserved for some time now.
A Steam code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
