Ricochet Infinity First Impressions: Breakout Casual Gaming Genre

Ricochet Infinity is a casual game that is like Breakout or Taito's Arkanoid games. In this game, you control a ship that has a shield in front of it. It can only move from side to side, like in Pong, only the paddle is horizontally oriented. You use this ship to manipulate an ion sphere, a ball that bounces all over the screen. You let the ion sphere bounce off your ship's shield to complete objectives, like breaking blocks, collecting golden rings, and other things.

This description may sound all too familiar, but it's the gimmicks that make this game more interesting than the usual Breakout clone. Whenever I think about a Breakout clone, I think of a bunch of bricks neatly arranged in horizontal rows. But right away, I was surprised to see such bricks rotated in all sorts of ways, forming neat shapes like a spider in a spider's web or the wheels of a truck. And the way these blocks move astonished me, too. In the spider stage, three bricks representing a fly would wander around the screen for a bit and then get stuck in the spider's web. Or seeing an empty truck pull back to the left side of the screen and then move to the right to reveal a bed of cargo. Designs like these make me curious about what the game will pull next.

Then the game reveals another gimmick to me: the recall. If you hold down the right mouse button, your ship acts like a weak magnet attracting the ball. This has plenty of uses. If the ball is just bouncing left and right at shallow angles, you can use the recall to force the ball towards your ship, so the ball can return to the top of the screen faster. If the ball goes above a row of bricks, you can trap the ball up there with the recall function to keep the ball up in the screen. If you master this recall function, you can even steer the ball into the last few remaining bricks in a level to finish the level quicker. Overall, the recall button lets me have more control over how I destroy the bricks in the level, and I like that.

I also toyed around with the game's five difficulty levels (in order of ascending difficulty): Kids, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Insane. Medium is the default. The ball is slower and the player starts with more ion spheres in the easier difficulty, and the ball is faster and the player gets more bonus points for completing levels in the harder difficulties. The Kids and Insane difficulties are particularly interesting. In the Kids difficulty, there is a permanent barrier at the bottom of the screen to prevent the balls from going out of bounds, so it's impossible to lose in this mode. You can relax and check out all of the game's level designs this way, and you get to keep any ships and ball paint schemes that you earn along the way. In the Insane difficulty, the ball starts out so small that it's an eyesore to keep track of it. Insane gamers would enjoy this mode, but I'd rather keep my eyes intact.

Overall, Ricochet Infinity is a fun game for gamers of all skill levels. In about 30 minutes, I managed to get through only about 15 levels, and the game claims to have 200 levels with thousands more available for download, so the game has great replay value. It's just great to see how games in the Breakout genre has evolved.