Pretty Girls Breakout! Gameplay Preview

I’ll just start by saying that Pretty Girls Breakout! isn’t hentai. Now that the air has been cleared, let’s get into the more important question of is the game any good.

The answer to that question is that the game is actually pretty solid! It relies on the tried and true Breakout/Arkanoid formula of bouncing a ball back at a set of bricks to break them. They add a twist to the game play making you press a button to bounce the ball back. You can angle the bounce of the ball by positioning your character to the left or to the right of the ball. The actual animation of the bat swinging has nothing to do with the curvature of the ball. It does feel a little strange but you get used to it pretty quickly.

They also add in their own version of powerups. The powerups include things like a mine, bullets, a longer bat, slowing down time, an extra ball in play, and a bar covering the bottom of the screen that automatically bounces balls back up a limited number of times. The powerups felt mediocre and not really impactful in my opinion.

There is another twist the to the gameplay. There are destructible enemies and indestructible turrets that shoot bullets at you. While the bullets can be reflected back, it makes the levels significantly harder to complete. The last few levels were pretty difficult and took me a while to finish.

Overall, Pretty Girls Breakout! is a solid Breakout game. It took me around three hours to finish the first time through. I actually had a decent amount of fun playing it. There are a few flaws though that did take away from the experience.

When playing the game on full screen mode with two monitors, the cursor can still be moved outside the main screen and when you press the mouse button outside the window, it minimizes the game. This is pretty frustrating as this will cause you to lose lives. When playing in windowed mode, the cursor outside the game window won’t minimize the game but you will still lose control of the character. Using keyboard controls can alleviate this but I found that using the mouse felt more natural.

Issues aside, it was a short but enjoyable way to kill some time.