You know when you are playing a brick breaker game, that getting the ball to bounce between the top row and the roof is the true objective? The less you have to worry about moving the paddle, the better you will do. Well, Radon Blast is very much aware of this, and has created a brick breaker game designed around the ‘true’ way to play them.
Radon Blast is a brick breaker game played unusually from left to right rather than vertically on the screen. It released on PC, Nintendo Switch and mobiles not so long ago, but has now seen a release on Xbox and PlayStation consoles as well.
You will notice when first loading up a level that on the right-hand side of the screen there is always a line of bricks, regardless of the setup of the rest of the bricks. This is the wall, and to destroy it requires ten hits with your ball. If you destroy the wall, then the ball can go through and onto the next level. The stages then form a chain where you can progress up and down depending on whether you destroy the wall or drop out of the left-hand side.
There are three difficulty levels to choose from: Kids, Normal and Hard. In Normal and Hard mode the ball will speed up over time and if you do drop down to the previous stage then the screen will flash red and you need to get the ball back to the latest stage as quickly as possible. Fail to do so by the end of a countdown and the ball will blow-up, causing you to lose another life.
On Kids difficulty, there is no penalty for dropping down a stage; you can do so as many times as you please without consequence. Though I object to the easy difficulty being referred to as ‘Kids’ mode, as this is the mode to use should you fancy the easy Gamerscore on offer with Radon Blast.
There are the usual power-ups in Radon Blast to find, such as score multipliers, extra balls and extra lives. Then there are standard bricks dotted around that require more than one hit to destroy. If the bricks require more than two hits though, then these are shown with the same pattern as the bricks with power-ups in, that go a brighter shade of the existing colour with each consecutive hit. The power-up ones are denoted by a green colour, but this is the only differentiation; those who suffer from colour blindness may have difficulty distinguishing between them.
The patterns of the bricks as a whole can range from faces, to flowers to unrecognisable objects at times. There is also an annoying tendency in levels to respawn bricks once all of a single colour has been destroyed. It is a mechanic that offers nothing positive, and the only reason I can think it has been included is to annoy and frustrate. Which it does superbly.
Another major factor with any brick breaker though is the physics. Radon Blast does have an uncanny ability to hit the final brick of a specific colour thus respawning them all but, for the most part, the ball goes where you intend it to.
It is very much a no-frills experience though. Aside from the three difficulties there is nothing else within Radon Blast. The order the levels come up are randomised, meaning that no two playthroughs should be the same, and your highest score is recorded. But there is nothing else in Radon Blast, save from the easy Gamerscore.
There is only even one music track that plays on a loop; a music track that becomes tiresome quickly.
As for the achievements, there are ten worth 100G each. There is only one achievement that may require a bit of effort – for having the ball travel through three stages without being hit – but you can easily set this up when playing on Kids mode. The rest of them though will simply come through playing naturally; there is very little difficulty to the full 1000G.
Radon Blast on Xbox presents a novel take on the classic brick breaker game, almost adding an element of survival. But even this doesn’t stop the game from becoming tiresome after only a short time. There is a lack of features, music and almost everything else; so much so that even the £4.19 price tag is asking a bit too much unless you are a true achievement hunter.
