Don't Bounce Off Breakout Beyond, Another Smart Update by Atari

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I have been terrible at Breakout longer than I have been bad (or good) at any other videogame. And trust me: I have been bad at videogames for a very long time. Breakout is something special, though, the first game I ever remember playing, and one I have never, at any point in my life, in any of its various permutations, been the slightest bit good at. It doesn’t matter what you call it—Breakout, Super Breakout, Arkanoid, Alleyway—if the game’s about bouncing a ball off a bar and against brick walls, I will be terrible at it. It was true whenever I first played Breakout back when I was barely old enough to form memories, and it’s true today, as I struggle through the brand new (and almost brilliant) Breakout Beyond.

Breakout Beyond is the latest in a string of smart updates of classic Atari games from the current owners of the company, and it’s a much bigger departure from the original formula than 2022’s fine Breakout: Recharged. It’s still about keeping a ball alive as it caroms between your paddle and a wall of breakable bricks, but instead of trying to clear the entire screen the end goal is getting that ball across a finish line buried behind all those bricks. There’s theoretically an ideal route through every stage, a minimum number of bricks that have to be eliminated in order to reach that finish line, and the game encourages that kind of speed by putting every stage on a time limit. You start with three balls per stage, and if you don’t get to the end before that time limit expires or those balls are gone, you lose.

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That’s a pretty significant change for Breakout, structurally. Another change is obvious the very first time you look at Breakout Beyond: instead of a vertical orientation, with your bar at the bottom of the screen and the bricks at the top, everything’s horizontal, with the bar at the left end of the screen—like you’ve put the whole game on its side. And almost every stage is larger than a single screen; it slowly scrolls to the right as you break through the first cluster of bricks, with your bar becoming momentarily stunned if it ever touches any bricks that you weren’t able to clear from the field. So you will regularly find yourself in a position halfway through a stage where a brick is in the way of your bar, preventing you from reaching the upper or lower part of the screen on your far-left perch, until the screen has scrolled past it. This Breakout is bigger, longer, with more ways to be punished—and, yes, less elegant, but given it’s been almost 50 years since this game was created, it’s probably okay to add new complications into the mix.

Although a ball is your primary weapon in Breakout Beyond, there is a range of Arkanoid-style power-ups that can be collected by hitting specially marked bricks. One of them adds a temporary wall beyond your bar, saving all your balls for a short time. Another multiplies your ball by three, letting you blast through bricks in a hurry if you’re able to keep them all in play. One more causes a cross-shaped explosion that clears two whole lines of bricks, and there’s also one that temporarily fires bullets from your bar, destroying any brick they hit. A cross-shaped power-up gives you an extra ball. The game doles these out throughout the early stages, sprinkling them in one by one before mixing and matching them liberally thereafter; when some of them combine—like, say, the multiball and the wall—it can cause true chaos, with balls flying in every direction, quickly destroying any fortress of bricks. (It gets even more chaotic if you trigger more than one multiball power-up at a time.) There are some stages that seem to require that kind of interaction—that seem unbeatable if you don’t trigger more than one power-up at a time.

These power-ups can make lightning-fast work of a stage, so obviously the game needs to start adding in ways to undermine them. Eventually stages will have bricks that need to be hit multiple times to destroy, or special blocks that instantly fast forwards through a chunk of the stage—-with whatever bricks you haven’t broken yet now cluttering up the limited, up-and-down path of your bar. The most frustrating version of Breakout Beyond are those levels made up almost entirely of bricks that need to be hit more than once, where the only way to succeed requires hitting a specific power-up within a certain amount of time and hoping you keep the ball(s) alive long enough to break through enough of those bricks. That requires precise aiming, which has always been my downfall with Breakout, and why it’s vexed me like no other game for as long as it has.

I don’t know if you need to be good at math, or shooting pool, or what (that’s geometry, right? but not the kind with the annoying proofs?), but my fatal flaw with Breakout Beyond is that I am absolutely terrible at guiding the ball. It moves in a clear trajectory depending on what part of the bar it bounces off of, but between the changing speed of the ball and the twitchiness of moving the bar I’ve never been able to internalize the specific formula behind it all. I can aim the ball in a specific direction with some reliability and consistency when I’m first launching it off the bar, but once it’s in play it takes everything I have just to keep it alive. Strategy isn’t much of an option when survival itself is a struggle. And so those stages where every brick needs to be hit three times, and where there simply isn’t enough time to do that without hitting a very specific power-up or fast forward brick early on, are pure crap shoots for me. I am worse at Breakout Beyond the more I try to aim, and so on those stages I just try to keep the ball alive as long as possible and hope against hope that I hit the one block I need to hit to have any chance of making it through. And no, that is not particularly fun, or interesting, or entertaining.

Breakout Beyond

There’s also the issue of not being able to play Breakout Beyond with a paddle controller. Traditionally you’d play Breakout with what is essentially a dial that you twist left to right to move the on-screen paddle. It’s the ideal interface for this kind of game, but it’s 2025 and you’ll almost definitely be playing Breakout Beyond with a console controller or your computer keyboard. I played it on the PlayStation 5, and moving the bar with an analogue thumbstick isn’t as precise or effortless as the old 2600 paddle. Beyond tries to compensate for that by letting you speed up the paddle with a button, or entering into “focus” mode, which slows down everything on screen (but not the clock ticking down the time limit). Joysticks and D-pads have never worked well with this kind of game (that’s one reason Nintendo’s Alleyway, a launch title for the original Game Boy, is forgotten and unloved), and although the ability to speed up or slow down helps restore some of the loss of feeling, it still can’t match playing with a paddle.

Despite the interface concerns and difficulty spikes, most stages fortunately aren’t roadblocks here. The stage selection screen features a large rectangular grid, with eight stages per row (there are 72 total stages in the game). When you complete one stage, two or three more on that row become playable, so if you get stuck on one you have others to choose from. Many times I hit a stage that felt too difficult or capricious to enjoy, and was able to just move past them to the next one. There are still stages I haven’t completed, simply because I got tired of banging my head against them.

The only hard stops come at the end of each row. You’ll need to complete the final stage of one row to unlock the next row. Fortunately, despite sitting in a de facto level boss position, those final stages tend to be pretty generous and flexible in how to beat them, so you probably won’t get too hung up on most of them. If you think a game should have a steadily increasing degree of difficulty, you’ll probably be annoyed by Breakout Beyond’s unpredictable structure, where one stage will be noticeably harder than the ones that bookend it; as somebody who, again, has sucked at these games as long as I’ve been able to suck at anything, I appreciate that open-endedness.

Aesthetically Breakout Beyond continues nu Atari’s commitment to the kind of sleek, retrofuturistic vibe that has been popular with old-fashioned games since at least the Geometry Wars days. Think black backgrounds, neon-bright colors for the bar and bricks, a laser-like shimmer on the bar, and an electronic soundtrack that splits the difference between ambient and something more beat-driven. The sound of the ball rebounding off the bar and bricks adds an inconsistent, irregular beat on top of it all. It’s what the ‘80s thought computer interfaces would look like in the 21st century, that Tron / Epcot style, and although it’s very familiar and obvious by this point, it does fit.

There is a two-player mode. I have not played it. At this age friends are for drinking and reminiscing and quietly talking about what went wrong, not for playing games.

There is not a leaderboard for the main game, which is surprising. Every stage keeps track of your high score and the highest your combo multiplier gets (it gets bigger every time a ball bounces off your bar until the ball is lost), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to compare them to other players online. That changes once you’ve completed the game’s 72 stages; that unlocks an endless infinity mode, which does have a global leaderboard. Seems weird, but I don’t make the games—I merely play them, badly.

Breakout Beyond also indulges in company nostalgia similar to how Astro Bot did for PlayStation properties. Before every stage you see a single-screen overview of the whole thing, and often the bricks will look like characters or screens from classic Atari games. One stage has three distinct sections of bricks that resemble, in order, a dragon, bridge, and trophy from Adventure. Another is structured like the Yar’s Revenge screen. It’s harmless, and no doubt many ancient Atariheads will be charmed by the references, but it’s also another sign of the IP-driven corporate soullessness that has overridden pop culture over the last few decades. Breakout Beyond can’t just be a smart new take on Breakout; it also has to have references and Easter eggs to other Atari games—including the one that introduced the whole Easter egg concept. This isn’t some fatal flaw, and it’s not really notable enough to harm my enjoyment of the game—once you’re inside a stage you can’t really tell what it’s trying to reference—but it is another small reminder of this annoying, ever-present aspect of our current culture. Apparently this game can’t break out beyond corporate mandates of plugging Atari’s other games.

Breakout Beyond’s updates to the formula result in a unique new take on this hoariest of videogames, but it also accomplishes something else: it makes it more accessible for people like me, who are eternal Breakout failures. The power-ups can cause short, concentrated blasts of pure chaos, but that chaos very often is the key to ripping through a level that would otherwise be an almost unbeatable slog. Players who are actually good at these games—who can quickly calculate trajectories and know which part of the bar to deflect a ball with—will still get to flex those muscles, while having to factor new options and obstacles into their strategy. The rest of us will simply enjoy a version of Breakout that’s simultaneously faster but more forgiving, more complicated but also more fun. And even if you aren’t old enough to have first-hand memories of not just the ‘80s but the very early ‘80s (or even the ‘70s, you relic), Breakout Beyond might be too timeless for you to bounce off.

Breakout Beyond was developed by Choice Provisions and published by Atari. Our review is based on the Playstation 5 version. It is also available on Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Atari VCS, PC, and Xbox One.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

Don’t Bounce Off Breakout Beyond, Another Smart Update by Atari