Breakout Birdie (Nintendo Switch) – The test

Breakout Birdie is the work of iSOL Games, a developer who creates mobile games with starving content at a price that is often far too high. We learned this the hard way by testing the three Easy Japanesey. Breakout Birdie is available for just one euro on the phone and four euros on theeShop. With content still so rickety?

Four euros, really?

Before starting the test, we would like to tell you that the game is not available in docked mode. The game is only played via touch and it is not possible to use the controller.

Breakout Birdie is a brick breaker with a very simple concept. You have your paddle that you move with your finger and your objective is not to break all the bricks, but to kill the bird that taunts us above them.

To kill the bird, you have to throw our bullet in its face several times. This takes almost no damage when bricks are still present on the ground. We will therefore have to clear the ground to reach our target.

There are certain special bricks that will make the adventure more complicated. We will have those which are destroyed in several blows, those which shrink as we pass, those which explode…

In addition to that, certain bricks will drop bonuses or penalties when destroyed. Once collected, the bonuses will either give us a second ball, or they will temporarily enlarge the paddle or create temporary “super balls”…

On the penalty side, we will be entitled to the ball which accelerates (which can sometimes help us when the pace is very slow), to the screen which temporarily turns black, to the paddle which shrinks…

And that's basically all you'll have during the entire game. The levels are similar, the gameplay varies very little and the pace is generally quite slow. So yes, Breakout Birdie is accessible. Getting started is quick, and the game is open to the whole family. It's always nice to do a brick breaker every now and then to relax.

A brick breaker without originality and very poor gameplay

This accessibility unfortunately does not hide the fact that Breakout Birdie is a lazy, unoriginal brick breaker with very poor gameplay. It looks exactly like the first Game Maker tutorial for making your very first game (we are taught how to make a brick breaker in fifteen minutes)…

The production is sloppy, the level design is quite poor, the pace is slow and even the brick breaker included in mobile phones is more interesting than this one. It even takes a few minutes to find flash games on the Internet with more qualities than Breakout Birdie.

We also do not validate the dishonest practice of publishers who quadrupled the price of their game, going from one euro on mobile to four euros on the Nintendo Switch.

Does portage justify this 400% increase? Absolutely not. Portage, as mentioned above, does the minimum. The game cannot be played with a controller (and therefore not in docked mode).

Indecent carrying

The game, moreover, which is still in mobile format, has black bars which take up more than half of the screen. It is impossible to have the game in full screen even when rotating our console (we tried!).

Furthermore, the price of four euros is certainly there to fool the consumer: by offering a price much higher than the real content of the game, the publishers hope to obtain some purchases when they put the game on promotion (and suffice to say, you will often see it on sale!).

The graphics are cute but it is impossible to validate this lack of personality or creativity which consists of recovering two or three royalty-free sprites to make a game whose sole objective is to scam gullible players. Furthermore, it only takes a few searches on the Internet to find the equipment used to create Breakout Birdie.

The music is also royalty-free and rather well chosen. We are just disappointed with the poor sound design, which adds the same bird sounds for each boss (the enemy to kill), even when it is not a bird.

The game is not translated into French but that's not really a problem. There are less than ten words in the game, which will not be blocking for the player, even one who does not speak English at all.

Given the specifics of the game which is only playable in portable mode, it is unfortunately impossible to offer you the gameplay video which usually accompanies our tests.

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