Hyper Breaker Turbo Review

Oh lord! Not another block-breaker game that thinks it can come along and be a success by piggybacking on a concept that has been around since the Atari. How many thousands of these are floating about the aether within Apple’s servers? Too many. They’re all just a rehash of the same thing you know, with slightly different graphics and music. That’s it. Oh wait, you say that Hyper Breaker Turbo lives up to its ridiculous name and is one of the best block-breaking games to come around in a long time? The hell it is! That’s what they all promise. Let’s check it out any way just in case. No rock unturned and all of that.

Hyper Breaker Turbo sounds like Aa mod that Vin Diesel would engage on his new ride in Fast and Furious 6. It sounds more like an appliance than a game. But if it is going to have “hyper” and “turbo” in its name, it better bring some adrenaline with it.

I don’t want to waste too much of your time by explaining a block breaking game. I’m sure you’d rather watch paint boil and pass out from the fumes. What you need to know is that Hyper Breaker Turbo actually does something fresh with the block breaking formula. I know, right?! Instead of simply giving you a boring old level with a bunch of blocks in various formations, this title has all the blocks littered about a tower with a goal at the end. You have to break the blocks to clear a path up the tower to your goal. You don’t have to spend twenty minutes trying to get that last block anymore. Wonderful.

Another lovely the additon to the formula is allowing for another plane of movement in the paddle you control. Instead of just right to left, you can now move it, albeit in a limited fashion, up and down. This gives you the chance to make a save and prevent your ball from falling into the lava. Not only that, but you can even use the paddle to smack the ball and give it a bit of extra power to break through some particularly stubborn blocks. But the trade-off is that the ball moves a bit quicker and is easier to lose.

Even though I’m making it sound like Hyper Breaker Turbo is the greatest thing to come to block-breaking since powerups, it doesn’t come without its own faults. The graphics could be a little more inspired. You can unlock a couple other game modes later on that change up the visuals a bit, but they just aren’t quite enough. We’ve seen what the Retina display can do and a game like Hyper Breaker Turbo could use a bit of sprucing up in the visuals department. I’d also like to see a few more varied and interesting power ups; maybe something that will let you skip a section of the tower or a bonus that adds a row of blocks beneath you to act as a safety net.

For all of those nitpicks, Hyper Breaker Turbo is a solid little block-breaking game. It isn’t enough to keep your attention rapt for hours on end, but it is an enjoyable way to sneak in a few minutes of gaming here and there. It will make you a bit nostalgic for the days when you could play a block-breaker on your TI-89 calculator in pre-calc. But at least with this game, you won’t have homework and you can enjoy the evolution of the genre into its current and enjoyable form.

Store Link: 1968 for iPhone & iPad | By Barry Kostjens| Price: $1.99 | Version: 1.0 | 31.6 MB | Rating 4+