We’ve all played Breakout/Pong-style games before, and although the wheel doesn’t need reinventing, I was impressed with the modifications to the classic game in the new universal app Anodia for iPhone and iPad.
Anodia takes the traditional premise of a brick-breaking game — hit a ball to knock out items and bounce it off a paddle to keep the game moving — and enhances it with unusual design across more than 50 levels. Instead of the typical stacks of breaks, each level of Anodia is impeccably designed with different objects, such as hanging lights on level one. Unlike the static levels of the past, Anodia’s objects move when they’re hit, creating an additional challenge in knocking them out entirely. Power-ups (or downs, depending) will fall from the items on occasion, giving you extra balls, firepower or roadblocks like cloud cover.
For gameplay, Anodia offers a quick-play option or the longer “campaign” method that tasks users with beating the entire game at once. One of the features I liked most about Anodia is its control options: Users can choose between touch to control the paddle with their finger, or tilt, which moves the paddle by physically moving the device. I found touch to be a bit slow and tilt to lack appropriate responsiveness at times, but the pure fact that Anodia is designed to work with both methods adds another dimension to gameplay.
The only downside I found in Anodia is that there is no music while in the levels (there’s an option for music, but it seems to only play on the menu page) and the app doesn’t support iPod playback.
Anodia was a steal at its 99-cent sale price, but still a worthy download — especially for users with iPhone and iPad — at its regular $1.99.
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