PC Game Review Hyperballoid 2: Time Rider

I’m trying with all my might to resist saying this, but my willpower went on vacation today. Hyperballoid 2: Time Rider ain’t your daddy’s (or mommy’s for that matter as I played video games as a kid) breakout game. How we’ve come a long way from Breakout and other bland brick breaking games.

Peggle first convinced me breakout games worth playing do exist even for those tired of such games (me included and that goes for arcade, too). Hyperballoid 2 grips from the start with its firecracking special effects, superb graphics, and variety of backgrounds — known as worlds — including ancient, hitech, original, and planets.

When you change worlds, you start a new game. Return to any world and you pick up from where you left off before. Not only does the background in the world represent that world’s theme, but also the arrangement of the bricks. In hitech, the game treats me a UFO flying in and out of the screen.

With 280 different kinds of bricks, it’ll be tough to get bored. There are standard rectangle bricks, rectangle bricks with a circle inside, stone bricks, bricks that detonate when hit. They also disappear and reappear, float, move back and forth, act as barriers.

Elements come flying down like a bridal bouquet for the catching for bonuses. Bonuses expand your paddle, give you multiple balls, shoot flames, shoot cannons. These bonuses have three different colors: green, yellow, red. Just like stoplights, green is good. Red is bad. Yellow — slowing down the ball’s movement, for one — is so so. Slowing down the ball gives you time to move your paddle, but it also makes you impatient waiting for it to do its thing.

The physics of the game work beautifully. Be prepared for balls defying physics as bonuses can turn them into crazy balls doing loopty-loops and other unpredictable moves.

For those who love to design and create, you can edit any of the levels to change them up and create your own to share. But this doesn’t appeal to me — it’s not easy to use and I don’t want to mess up the original settings. The toggles, options, buttons have no labels, so move the mouse pointer over each item to see its tooltip to find out what the item does. Too time consuming.

The game’s mode (easy, normal, hard, expert) is adjustable, but the pop up window that appears at the start for selecting the mode has typos, so it doesn’t make sense. It also takes effort to figure out how to switch modes because this doesn’t appear in the options. Instead, you return to the main menu and click “Other Campaigns.” Here you can download new campaigns like Chinese Zodiac and each new campaign comes with a five star rating system as voted by the community.

Hyperballoid 2 lasts for a long time with over 200 levels to beat. It’s also easy to pick up the game when you haven’t played it for a long time. Hyperballoid 2 is like playing a variety of solitaire games where the rules never change. Superb visuals, diversity of everything, and smashing audio effects (loud, too… had to turn down the settings… way down) will take players out of this world giving them a break from their daily lives for a little while.