Bricks n Balls - Block Breaker

I’ve played this game for years. I’m somewhere in the 400s and like most reviews have said, eventually just just have to go back to old levels. Within the last year or so I’ve noticed the changes, specifically with the ability to accrue rubies. The daily reward on the 7th day was 150 with an option to double when watching an ad. Rubies are not the easiest to come by so this was well worth it. After they changed it to only receive 50 rubies extra, it wasn’t worth it. My phone gets very warm while playing and drains my battery very quickly. Which then makes the game lag or freeze and completely kick me out. I’ve seen other reviews of people suggesting something running in the background and I definitely believe this to be the case as during gameplay I get notifications from my internet provider that they’ve blocked an unsecured URL for me. My partner says they always know when I’m playing the game because it will be constant. Also, if I set my phone down while playing it does not eventually go to sleep like any other app I use. Leading me to again believe something else is always running. I also miss the weekly reward with the boosts for certain amounts of time. This was a nice way to go back to older levels or wait for the boost and use on the current level I was stuck at. I do enjoy this game. Don’t even mind all the ads between levels or when restarting. But I feel it might be time to move on to something else as the helpful boosts and ability to get resources has disappeared. And so has my enjoyment.

As far as the actual game goes, I love it. There are great boosts and it is, of course, a satisfying game to play while you watch all the blocks get decimated. That said, it could use some technical improvements. I am no stranger to free games and the ads they frequently force you to watch every couple rounds. Typically I have seen these ads be 5 to 10 seconds in length or click out immediately. I don’t mind ads- Ive found a lot of games I like through them and Usually I don’t get stuck watching the 30 second ads unless I choose to in order to gain some extra points or prize. In this game, almost every single ad is 30 seconds long and they make you watch one after every round. I wind up spending more time watching ads than playing the game. It would be nice if they could shorten the ads if they are going to require you to watch one in order to play each level. The bigger issue was that I did not even get to have this game on my phone for 24 hours before it started having major issues and kept restarting on me. For the last few hours I have gotten an error message that says “Data verification error, game will begin to synchronize the data and be restarted (1).” Every time the game restarts the message comes up again and I have not been able to play anymore levels. I have restarted my phone several times and cannot seem to remedy the issue so I guess I am just going to have to delete the game.

Normally I do not give freemium games the time of day. I believe all freemium games should be eliminated from the planet :-). This however, in my opinion could be seen as a free to try then pay to remove adds game. That I am fine with. In fact I wish more games would follow that model. However, they still offer adds for more Ruby’s or whatever they are and pitch a weekly subscription model which annoys me. However, that being said you don’t have to do those things and can still play the game. Once I paid to remove the adds the game was great. I would give it 5 starts if it were not for the other remnants of the freemium business model. And the subscription pitch seems like they were just having a meeting and said “let’s see if anyone is stupid enough to do this and pay us money weekly for the game”. If that got in the way of the actual game other than just having to skip it when you first load then I would not play at all. So, I would suggest a few tweaks: keep the free to download and pay once to unlock full game model. Polish the game up a bit as a buy once game and get rid of freemium / subscription based remnants.