Just about every one of us has played either Breakout or one of its many clones or spiritual successors. Break 'em All is another take on the classic formula that has players busting blocks with a paddle and a bouncing ball. In an effort to appeal to a wider audience, D3 is offering Break 'em All as a budget title; an aspect that the DS is actually lacking in its library at the moment. So does Break 'em All succeed, or is it merely a bust? Read on for the verdict.

Facts and Features

• Single cartridge multiplayer for up to 8 players
  
• Several game modes
  
• Touch screen support
  
• Over 3 million levels
  
• 12 different block types and 12 different power-ups
  
• Budget priced at $19.99

By nature, just about anything released that is based on the original Breakout formula is going to be fairly simple, but Break 'em All adds a few new twists to the gameplay format. The most significant and noticeable advantage that Break 'em All has over past Breakout style games is the control scheme. Break 'em All allows the gamer to choose either the L and R buttons or the touch screen to control the paddle. The L and R button work well enough at slow speeds, but it's nearly impossible to keep up with the ball for any extended period of time when the speed picks up. The touch screen offers a more accurate and smoother control experience, but it's almost too accurate. Considering that you can tap the screen and have the paddle jump to that point or that you can move the paddle as fast as you can move the stylus, it's pretty simple to keep the ball in play even at the fastest speeds the game throws at you. Still, the touch screen control is a huge step towards emulating the original spinner knob on the original version of Breakout. Since it's impossible to capture the exact feel of the original without a special controller, the DS touch screen is as close as anything is going to come.

The level variety in the game is nice, and the randomly generated block formations will help to keep the game worth pulling out often. Some of the levels are fairly simple, but a few will have you spending quite a bit of time to pick up that last block or two. On one level there is a bunch of indestructible blocks that spell out DS while there are two destructible blocks near the top of the screen squeezed up against the letters. Getting these two blocks can take a while, but there is a fairly good sense of satisfaction when you manage to pull it off.

To help you plow through the many levels in Break 'em All, the game offers several power-ups that range from paddle modifications to ball behavior changes. The power-up system is similar to what is found in the Gradius series. Before starting a game the player decides which power-ups he or she wants to make available and in what progression they are attainable. During gameplay, and as the player gains points, the power meter fills to make the power-ups available. The first power-up is available quickly, but the player must choose to skip that power-up or initiate it and drop the power-up meter back to zero. If you choose to skip a power-up you must wait until you've depleted the meter on another and wait until you fill the meter up to that point again to use it. Most of the time, however, it's in the player's best interest to skip all of the lower power-ups available to them and use only the most powerful one; which is either a ball that cuts through blocks rather than bouncing off them or a ball that takes out several blocks in a small area per hit (depending on the power-up chosen before starting the game). The laser or bomb upgrades last only for a few moments, but since the player can rack up large amounts of points in that time period, they can usually have their power meter near full capacity by the time it wears off. Making the power-ups optional, with the powerful ones being random, would probably have helped the game maintain a better balance and challenge.