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I bought this game for only a buck in a video game store, not even knowing what it was but it was yet more progress towards my complete PSP collection. After looking at it better when I was looking for a game to play, it turned out to be an Arkanoid clone! Not only that, but it also had RPG elements! The description interested me and thus I booted it up. Beta Bloc quickly introduces you to its main gimmick because this is one of the few games where you actually hold your PSP vertically. This.. surprisingly doesn't work all that bad. The d-pad is used to move the paddle around which is the most important part of Arkanoid. A slight issue however, is the amount of controls there are. Literally every button is used, and while that works while holding the system normally, it's less effective when holding it vertically. There's also not really a tutorial on what buttons has what function, as it took me until close to the end to realize there's a rumble feature for whenever your ball gets stuck. But aside from that it is your usual brick-breaking action game, with an emphasis on leveling, stats and magic spells for your paddle. The magic system ends up being the power-ups in normal Arkanoid games, they only don't appear randomly in stages now and instead have to be bound to your paddle. I wasn't really a big fan of this as the randomness of the power-ups is also a major part of Arkanoid games. Instead it's a bare-bones Arkanoid game now, with each world having its own gimmicks like teleporting and directional squares sure, but that does not change the fact that most of the gameplay is just watching a ball bounce. Then again, Beta Bloc does give the paddle a projectile to kill enemies, but not blocks. This does make the Arkanoid gameplay a bit better as you can't just focus on the ball, but also on enemy attacks. Enemies are sometimes more annoyances than actual obstacles however, as they are just in the way and always bounce the ball back. I wasn't really a fan of the physics in Beta Bloc to begin with as you had to actually move in a direction to bounce the ball in that direction instead of having it land on a side of the paddle. The ball wasn't as easy to control as it would be in other games, especially with the stages not always being squares, but cylinders with obstacles sticking out of the wall. There are also indestructible blocks everywhere, and it's very easy to get stuck. Fortunately that's where the rumble feature comes into play.. which I didn't know until late so I restarted quite often. But yeah, overall I'd say that the gameplay does some good stuff for the game like an RPG progressions system, but loses the random power-ups as a trade-off. Regardless, I did have fun with Beta Bloc because at its core, it's an Arkanoid game. There are many others I'd pick over this one, but I did not regret playing this.
6/10
