Arkanoid Plus! Review

Arkanoid debuted in the arcades back in 1986 and was essentially a Breakout clone with a few new additions, mainly power ups that would cause different things to happen.

Since then it’s appeared on just about everything you can imagine and the game play hasn’t changed much. Now, for the first time, it’s appearing on WiiWare in the form of Arkanoid Plus! It’s essentially a revival of the franchise with the Plus! added onto all of Taito’s WiiWare titles now.

If you’re new to the Arkanoid franchise and have never played a Breakout style game before here’s the basic game play run down. You control a ship at the bottom of the screen that you can move left and right. The object of the game is to keep a ball in play that will remove the blocks on the upper portion of the screen when it hits them. Some of the blocks take multiple hits and some can’t be removed at all. Once all of those blocks are removed you have to doors that appear on the left and right portion of the screen that will take you to the next level. Each of those doors has a different level, but you really don’t know which level comes next so it’s pretty random in that respect If your ball flies past your ship and off the bottom of the level you lose a life and continue until you’ve finished the levels or you have no more lives left.

The game play is pretty simple and in the arcade you actually controlled the game with a knob that rotated. In the WiiWare version you use the Wii Remote on its side, classic controller or GameCube controller to move your ship left and right. In all honesty, the game feels much more fluid if you have a knob controller, but that’s not an option on Wii. The controls work just fine and are very responsive, but you lose a little bit of the precision you would have with the knob.

The presentation of Arkanoid Plus! is pretty sparse. There is a small intro story that will get you into the story of the game, but it’s never been a big part of the game and in all honesty I couldn’t tell you what the story is about as you just simply want to get to the block breaking action. After you’ve completed all the levels of the story mode you’re faced with a boss that can change depending on the path you chose to get to the end. The blocks are all various colors of the rainbow and are identical aside from a few that will take multiple hits to remove. Randomly throughout the levels you’ll get power ups that can make your ship grow larger or smaller, allow you to fire lasers that can be used to remove blocks while the ball is flying through the air, give you multi-ball play and more. There are also “enemies” on the screen that will impede the ball and cause it to fly off in a different direction. Aside from that they’re harmless and pretty much just get in the way.

There is also some DLC that can be accessed giving you essentially a second story mode for the cost of 200 Wii Points and it’s a worthy addition if you’re a fan of Arkanoid. There’s nothing new that this game brings to the franchise, and really you don’t need anything new as the game has always been about breaking blocks and the formula works pretty well. It’s not groundbreaking or awe inspiring. It’s simply good, clean fun.

Final Score: 3/5 Average