Welcome to Darkanoid, an indie game made by Russian developer Shezo Games. But before that, it’s time for a little history.

In 1927, the Soviet Union produced its first production car, the NAMI-1. While considered an engineering success to the USSR, it ultimately failed because they weren't talented in making cars. So, instead, they decided to take a British Ford Prefect E39A, reverse engineer it, translate its measurements into the metric system, manufacture it cheaply with a smaller engine (but with better suspension for rough roads), and sell it under a new name, the KIM-10. The whole point of this is one, I believe the folks at Shezo Games have channeled their ancestral Soviet power into this game by taking Arkanoid and adding a “D” on the front of it, turning the screen 90 degrees, and then calling it a day.

In Darkanoid, you are a paddle-shaped spaceship designed to exclusively move up and down and shoot a bouncy ball at some blocks (and enemies) in space. If your ball flies behind your ship or you get hit by a laser, you take damage. It’s essentially single-player Pong but instead of battling against another player, it’s blocks, enemy ships who fire lasers, and an adorable little boss fight at the end of each chapter. 

GAMEPLAY 2/10

Now, it's time to talk about my least favorite part of this game. Where do I begin? I should start by saying that I believe it's fair to compare this game with at least the original Arkanoid from 1986 because Shezo has outright said that their game is based heavily on that.

           The Controls:

• You control your ship by moving the mouse up and down.

• You fire your ball with a left-click.

• You activate a short-duration shield with a right-click.

• Whatever power-ups you collect are also activated by left-clicking. Pretty simple. 

Gasp! What happens next? After firing your ball, it will bounce off of blocks and enemies, gathering vast amounts of zoom juice, making it go at blistering speeds around the screen, destroying any blocks and enemies in its path. It's satisfying to see the destruction, but it's a gift and a curse because you have to defend your side of the screen with your ship quickly, or else it'll zoom past you, and you'll take damage (think Pong, as I mentioned earlier). You have six health, and dying restarts the level with no penalty. Enemies can spawn from hitting specific blocks, and so do power-ups. Defeat all the enemy ships, break all the blocks, don't die, and you beat the level.

 The Good: It’s fun to watch the ball break blocks at high speed, and when a level has finished, you never have to play it again.

The Bad: This game based itself on an arcade game from the ’80s, and those games were machines meticulously designed to suck quarters away from players with their insane difficulty. I would expect Darkanoid to follow suit, but the problem, I find, is found not in requiring skill but in minor annoyances that bog down the whole experience into something more frustrating and unrewarding. 

Some enemies spawn with a shield that can be broken by the ball hitting it. But the guard respawns every 5 seconds, so it takes way too much effort to beat one guy. Since there are usually several enemies on screen at a time, you get bombarded with laser shots while having to prevent the ball from bouncing back behind your ship, meaning you often must take the hit to keep going. 

Power-ups are also in this game, and they are given to you immediately after you hit a power-up block. What annoys me is that one power-up shrinks your ship size, but you can't avoid it because you need to break all of the blocks to beat the level, so you have to take a downgrade. Downgrading isn't an issue in the original Arkanoid because you have to collect the power-ups as they fall towards you, so you have the chance to dodge ones you don't want.

The screen is also a massive issue for me. As I mentioned before, Darkanoid has the screen rotated 90 degrees to the right compared to Arkanoid, and this structure makes the game way harder than necessary. Since most computer monitors today are wider than they are tall, the form factor doesn't make sense, and it just hurts my eyes. You have to pay attention to the laser shots coming at you and your ball moving at the speed of light that can go from one side of the screen to the other in a split second, and it becomes insanely difficult to manage. I resorted to just paying attention to playing Pong instead of the actual game. 

The Ugly: The level design doesn't work like I think the developers intended. Sometimes levels have narrow pathways where, if you launch the ball just right, it will break the blocks from the inside out. It's very satisfying to make it work, and you would think that you might want to create a strategy to complete the task. Still, there are two reasons why this doesn't work: one, at the start of each level, the ball will automatically fire if you hold on to it for too long, so you don't have time to strategize, and two, no matter what level I was on, it made no difference if I made a strategy or not. I could brute force my way through, die a bunch of times, and then, at random, beat the level. For some reason, if you win a stage with low health, you don't get your health back at the start of the next. There's no penalty for dying, so what's the point? 

GRAPHICS 5/10

The graphics for this game are sufficient. The game comprises 3D models of ships, 2D models of blocks, and a background of outer space; I would call it "functional" as far as graphics go. Since Shezo Games is such a small company, I can give them a pass. I cannot give a pass on visual clarity because the original Arkanoid did this way better back in 1986. In it, the blocks have distinct colors to show how much health they have. In Darkanoid, the colors and designs made to represent the blocks blend in with each other to make the screen look like a mess of Minecraft pixel art with only cobblestone, blue wool, and sponges. The enemy ships that come out of the blocks also blend in with the background, meaning sometimes you won't notice they've shot at you until it's too late. 

SOUND QUALITY 7/10

The sounds in Darkanoid fit with the overall look of the game. Nothing seems out of place; it just feels a bit bland.

But my favorite sound is of the balls bouncing off blocks and walls. It's just so punchy and satisfying. 

OVERALL 6/10

I will be completely honest, I did not enjoy most of my time with this game. The sounds are pleasing, the graphics are fine, the music is okay, but the game works well on a functional level. The game isn't buggy or glitchy like you may expect from such a small, young developer, and for that, I can give Shezo some props. For an indie game by such a small team, I'd say it was not bad. With a few gameplay tweaks, I might even call this game good in the context of arcade-style games. I wish Shezo Games the best of luck in their future endeavors.

**The reviewer received this game for free.