Welcome to our review of Breakpoint, a very harsh twin-stick slasher that reminded me of Asteroids!
Charge. Break. Defeat. Repeat.
We mixed elements from classic arcade games with modern sensibilities to bring you Breakpoint: a challenging top-down score chaser featuring melee weapons that explode.
In a twist on the twin-stick formula, you have no ranged attack. Instead, slice, crush, and blast your way through the swarm. Push your weapons to their breakpoint to unleash a devastating explosion on your enemies. Break, charge, and break your weapons again as you fight to stay alive.
Features:
• Master the challenges of a single, focused game mode.
• Wield five distinct melee weapons, each with three levels of upgrades.
• Break your weapons, annihilating everything in the blast zone.
• Dodge through swarms of twelve different enemies.
• Compete with your friends for score, or reach for the top of the global leaderboard.
• Watch the best run of anyone in the world through the replay system.
Breakpoint immediately reminded me of asteroids the classic among classics. And despite the differences it’s not being able to shoot projectiles, the feeling is all there. But in all honesty, Breakpoint is a lot more difficult especially because of the lack of shooting projectiles. Breakpoint might be the game with the hardest first impression that I’ve played in a long time.
Most of the time, I was just trying to evade the incoming enemies and occasionally slash them down. This gets especially hectic after a few waves and when the enemies become very numerous, just imagine not just a handful of them, but the entire screen is filled with them. Very overwhelming at first and I can say my very first game really suffered because of this.
But the more I played, the more comfortable I became with the twin-stick shooting mechanism, well twin-stick slashing is more precise. As you progress through the waves of enemies you can pick up upgrades to your weapon which will, in turn, make it get a further reach or a higher hit rate. This is the kicker in this game ask the original weapon is slow, to say the least. Luckily it does get better!
To give you guys an insight into my first game, I barely scored 100 points, thinking this twin-stick slashing was not for me but Luckily I did get used to it and frequently score well above many thousands. I appreciate the international and online leaderboards that are available. One of my first games had me in the top 1000 already, making me proud.
Graphicly Breakpoint looks like it was made in the late 80s but it really fits the game. As much as I wonder what a more modern layout would do for a game like this, it is not a necessity at all as I do enjoy the classic appearance it has.
Mechanically the twin-stick slashing mechanism does take a little while to get used to and I struggled with it quite a bit at first, resulting in mostly me just running away as much as I could. As levels progressed, it became clear that this is the way to go and balance my escape route in between the hordes of enemies, hopefully taking down many enemies as I randomly button mashed the attack button.
In conclusion, Breakpoint delivers quite the challenge and it’s quite hard at first but once you get past the unusual mechanics it is up to you to really shine and take out as many enemies as you can before eventually falling in combat.
