Krakout (C64/CPC/Spectrum) Reviews

Just as i remember it. BIG thanks to developers! :)

ZX Spectrum 48K version: 👍FOREVER 👍

Man, I love myself some Arkanoid but as it is not available on steam so far Krakout is the next best thing. A breakout clone with a 90-degree twist, I remember playing it back in the 80s and really enjoying it back then, I enjoyed playing it now as well. If you never played breakout or a clone, give this one a try, it's basically next level pong gameplay, destroy all destroyable blocks of a level to progress via hitting the ball with your paddle, thoose days were simpler, much simpler :-). But this game is unforgiving at times, several levels are designed to steal your lifes on purpose, to sum it up, unfair level design at places, I highly doubt anybody reached level 100 in this game without trainers/pokes. It seems the game has 100 unique levels, which repeat randomly after level 100, I stopped playing around level 135. All three computer versions included are nice and play well and it's a good case study to see how the 3 big 8-bit machines differt from each other. Anyways, I really really recommend this game to anybody who wants to take a look behind the 80s gaming curtain, this is a great cas study and a great game it is as well.

This is one of my favorite computer games for the Commodore 64 in the 1980's. The graphics are really outdated now, but I still enjoy playing it.

Time played does not include hundreds of hours on the Commodore 64. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw Krakout on Steam. While Pixel Games UK has been re-releasing old 8-bit Gremlin Graphics games for a while, most of their library wasn't really to my taste. But here it is, a top ten C64 game and maybe a top ten [i]game[/i] for me. And yes, the C64 version is included, while I've moaned in the past about Pixel Games leaving the C64 port out of other releases. While the Spectrum and Amstrad versions are interesting curiosities (including the floating Jack the Nipper heads on the Speccy), this game was by far most at home on the C64, with the incredibly catchy Daglish soundtrack (the Amstrad has a go but just doesn't have the range), pleasantly squishy-looking bricks and optional scrolling backgrounds. What's the actual game? Breakout/Arkanoid is turned around 90 degrees, increasing the area of play and allowing for much more interesting brick formations. Other oddities like a ball-gobbling enemy add up to make Krakout one of the best ever iterations of the bat and ball formula. Rather infamously, the C64 version allowed for getting the ball stuck - intentionally or not - behind indestructible bricks which keep adding to the score, allowing for more or less infinite lives and rendering any high score in this game pretty much meaningless. That quirk seems to have been retained here. The save game feature is definitely an improvement for those long sessions with hundreds of lives racked up. (I distinctly remember leaving the C64 running for 48 hours or more back in the day...) Does it actually hold up? Having played a lot of Arkanoid: Eternal Battle lately, I do find that the physics in Krakout feel rather wonky and the enemy interactions often feel unfair. This doesn't diminish the "one more go" factor and I can easily see sinking many more hours into this, a quick 15 minutes at a time. Unreservedly recommended.