You remember Breakout, right? With a screen filled with rectangular blocks at the top and a “ball” you bounced off a bar at the bottom, destroying the blocks it hit. First released in 1976, it’s been remade and cloned over the past thirty-six years so often (Arkanoid, Alleyway) that even if you’ve never played the original, you’ve probably played some version of it.
Wizorb, from Montreal-based Tribute Games, de-abstracts the Breakout clone, wedging it into an aesthetic recalling mid-1990s home console RPGs like Shining Force. Chunky pixel sprites show a kingdom attacked by monsters and the wizard who is tasked with destroying them, using an orb (the ball) and a magic wand (the bar).
The game is divided into several worlds of twelve or so stages each. These stages are the Breakout levels, inhabited by both inanimate blocks and by monsters that function as moving blocks: Hit them a few times with the orb and they’ll die, but you have to make sure to take into account their movements as you bounce the orb around.
Where other Breakout clones added powerups that would drop from blocks as you destroyed them, Wizorb has magic spells that are fueled by a mana bar. Blocks will occasionally release a mana refill, an extra life, an attack or gold. This gold can be used to buy mana refills, extra lives or items that cause different effects like allowing you to stop the ball on the bar, or cause it to split into three.
The game becomes two different kinds of resource management: First, the gathering of money and mana as they fall from the blocks must be balanced against keeping the orb in the playing field. If you miss it with your wand, the orb falls off the bottom of the stage and you lose a life. While you can save your progress and restart at the beginning of your most recent level in any world, leaving a session mid-world will reset your score. It’s kind of a weird arcadey throwback, and it adds a level of challenge as you try to complete the world in a single go.
