Game Reviews

Although they provide some of the most meaningless fun in videogames, it would be nice if "brick-breaker" games like Atari's Breakout and Taito's Arkanoid tried to liven things up a bit. Arkanoid added power-ups, enemies, and increasingly complex stage designs to Breakout's formula, but even now, it's still based on the same physics and general concept.

Sidhe's Shatter certainly follows the path of those games, but it (finally) adds some new wrinkles to the concept, making it feel new instead of yet another money-grabbing rerun. It's still the same "destroy all the blocks to win" setup, but here, more realistic physics come into play. For starters, your paddle, or "bat," has the ability to suck and blow air, which directly affects the trajectory of the ball(s) you send out (thankfully, an ever-present line always shows you where the ball is headed). With some blocks free-floating on their own, and a variety of stage types that go from horizontal or vertical arenas to circular ones where you move your bat on a curve, Shatter will constantly test your reflexes as you try to keep your eye on the ball.

This isn't about dwelling on the intricacies of the physics, though. Like any game of its kind, Shatter is very easy to understand, and other than the suck-and-blow moves and different ball power-ups, the only other ability comes from grabbing blue shards that fly out from blocks, which in turn fills up your Power Bar. Once that is full, you can release a "shard storm" that unleashes a flurry of bullets in front of you as time slows, helping you clear out any blocks in your way, or assisting you in attacking a boss. It only lasts a few seconds but provides a satisfying reprieve. So satisfying, in fact, that it's possible to be so involved trying to suck in gobs of shards that you may lose track of the ball or some other incoming object. That's not necessarily a negative, but it's something to stay mindful of.

And it's the bosses that give Shatter some semblance of characterization. The evil robots that you go up against are either simple and stupid, like Bad Bat, a larger, meaner bat than your own, or big and gimmicky, like the agile and regenerating Bloctopus.