Brick-busting Arkanoid style games are nothing new, yet Brickies feels more fresh than most. Offering a few new tricks up its sleeve goes a long way to enticing you into carrying on playing.
The key change to Brickies is how missing a shot doesn’t mean game over. Instead, it deactivates the ball, leaving it useless until you bounce it back again with one of your paddles. You have two paddles - one on either side of the screen - which respond in the same manner throughout. The focus is less on keeping your ball in play, and more on getting things done quickly, with each level offering a fairly tight time limit on things.
That leads to a fairly fast-paced and enjoyable experience. The only thing that slows Brickies is its reliance on adverts. You can watch a long advert to get extra time during a level, but you also get adverts at regular points between stages. Brickies could do with an in-app purchase option for impatient types to circumvent it. Also, ocassionally, some stages are overly reliant on luck rather than skill, a common issue for the genre.
Regardless, Brickies is mostly a blast. You’ve played things like it before, but it offers enough to make you come back for more.