I've only needed to play 14 levels of Amazing Breaker to tell you it is worth your 99 cents. I've only needed to use the game's slingshot to launch helicopter bombs onto a massive glass mug of beer to know that playing this game is a proper way to use an iPhone.
Amazing Breaker, recommended to me by friend of Kotaku and MTV's gaming expert, Russ Frushtick, is an alternate species of Bust a Move, Peggle, Angry Birds or whatever other pleasures involve aiming a projectile from one end of a screen toward a mass of targets on the other end and then firing away. These are the games that, at their best, reward the player's dual aspirations to feel like a master tactician and the recipient of a lucky bounce.
Amazing Breaker's conceit is that your targets in level after level are massive, flat ice sculptures, 90% of which must be shattered before you can proceed. The ammunition you fire at them are bombs. The bombs are varied and available in predefined configurations set to each levels. Maybe you'll be given a red bomb, two greens, a blue and then a purple to use against a massive ice rose. Regular red bombs detonate a moment after sticking to the surface at which they were aimed. Green bombs may be split into three diverging smaller bombs, but only if and when the player taps a green bomb that they've set in flight. Blue bombs are ghosts and can be steered through the mass of their targets before exploding. Purples can drop sub bombs in their flight path. Some bombs don't explode until another one near them does. A good bomb shooter will establish a necklace of undetonated munitions around the edge of a glass target before using one last shot to explode the whole thing.
Amazing Breaker is almost immediately interesting and hard. Whatever your preference when it comes to firing projectiles at stuff on the screen of your smartphone, add this game to your routine. Surely those Angry Birds could use a break, anyway.
Amazing Breaker [iTunes]
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