Previous Next

Arkanoid 2 is that game which everyone wants to play when they come round to your house. I even caught my Mum having a sneaky go on it once when I came home from school.

Knocking bricks out of a wall may not sound like a particularly amusing pastime, but the likes of Thru The Wall, Batty, Arkanoid, and this, the best of the clones, have proved that theory wrong. It's an utterly brilliant idea and more addictive than a packet of Jaffa Cakes (and probably just as chocolatey).

Simply all that happens is that a ball bounces around the screen knocking bricks out of a wall at the top, and you have to bounce the ball on a bat until all the bricks have been knocked out and you get onto a new screen. You probably knew that already of course, but what you may not be too clued up on are the multitude of extra features available.

Firstly, the bricks. Some just disintegrate on hitting them, as you'd expect, some need more than one hit before they'll go, some don't disappear at all, some move about and some come back after a time as well. Quite an impressive list of different sorts of bricks there, I thought. And capsules also fall down when certain bricks are hit - if caught then they'll do various interesting things to you (such as make your bat bigger, make your bat smaller, turn your bat into a laser so you can shoot the bricks etc etc etc).

As I've already mentioned, Arkanoid 2 really is rather addictive - you keep on playing it if only to see all the screens, of which there are approximately loads (my Mum can only get onto the second one though). You get onto a different screen depending on which side you exit once you've completed each level, so however many levels you thought 'loads' was before, double it.

If I was asked to sum up Arkanoid 2 in a word, I'd probably use "brilliant." If on the other hand I was allowed to use more than one word. I'd probably still say "brilliant", but in a slightly more roundabout way.