Let’s focus on the franchise trappings first. Kirby’s Block Ball has many gameplay elements that set it apart from the pack. When you lose a life the pace is reset thankfully. As he continues to reflect off of blocks Kirby speeds up. It’s always predictable thanks to the physics engine, but things can quickly become chaotic making it tough to predict where you’ll need to block it. In normal gameplay Kirby bounces off of everything. Then it’s back to the same old regular ball. This speeds him up and he becomes more destructive, but the effect lasts only a short while. Kirby grows and transforms into his normal persona when you perform a power hit with the paddle by pressing A just as he comes into contact with it. During normal gameplay he isn’t his old recognizable self and just looks like a generic ball. Thankfully HAL has us covered.Īs you may be able to guess Kirby himself functions as the ball. Especially one made by a Nintendo affiliated studio. I’ve always been a fan of Breakout, but to be honest I expect a little more in the various clones. These become more technical with more diverse patterns and hazards. Your goal is to eliminate every block in each stage. When it does you lose a life and start over. Your simple goal is to bounce a ball off of it to prevent this from reaching the bottom of the play area. You guide a paddle at the bottom of the screen but can only move it left and right. It’s a top down level based puzzle game that functions somewhat like pinball.

If you aren’t familiar with Breakout then let me give you a rundown of how it plays. Initially I expected this to be a reskinned version of Puyo Puyo.

Either way let’s take a look at this fast and frantic retro puzzle game.

I was just happy it wasn’t another reskinned version of Puyo Puyo to be perfectly honest. Kirby’s Block Ball is clearly a Breakout clone. Developer HAL Laboratories decided to release a Kirby themed puzzle title for the platform and the results were absolutely fantastic. So what happens when you take these two popular ideas, and mix them? Kirby’s Block Ball, that’s what. Kirby was also a very popular game and his presence was focused around Nintendo’s portable system. With Tetris on the Game Boy puzzle titles became absolutely huge on handheld consoles.

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