App Of The Week: The Brickening

The App: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.vigasotech.thebrickening 

The Good: The Brickening is a classic brick-breaker game (bounce the ball off a paddle at the bottom of your screen, and try to hit all the bricks on screen without dropping the ball). Lots of power-ups change gameplay by doing things like giving extra balls or changing the size of your paddle, and a generous number of multi-ball power-ups means that you get to watch twenty or more balls ricochet across your screen surprisingly often. 100 levels means you won't play all the way through it any time soon.

The Bad: Often lags on my Droid 2, which has cost me more than a few games. The 1/2-size-paddle power-up makes the paddle so small that the game is virtually unplayable; not a big deal, but frustrating. Sticky-pad (the ball sticks to the paddle when it hits) is not compatible with multi-ball play, so you can't release a "shotgun blast" by picking up multiple balls and releasing them all at once. (When a single ball hits the sticky paddle, all other balls disappear.) This makes sticky-pad useless for anything except slowing your game wayyyy down. EDIT 3-27-2011: I had suspicions of this, but I'm just now certain that it has this issue. If you leave the program alone for a certain amount of time, it defaults to Level 15 with two lives (one life lost from the default 3) , no matter what level you were on or how many extra lives you pick up.

The Bottom Line: Lots of issues mean that this game wouldn't be worth paying for, but it's a fun free way to kill time. (Or procrastinate, depending on what you are/are not doing)