I stumbled across Amazing Breaker [99¢] a few days ago, and since then it’s been sucking up a surprising amount of my time. I think the quickest way to describe the game is that Amazing Breaker is Angry Birds’ cousin, twice removed on its mothers side. It’s a catapult-style flinging game with multiple types of ammo, a three star grading system, and a bunch of levels to play through. There’s just enough of that Angry Birds style gameplay in it that if you like those kind of games you’ll love Amazing Breaker, but it still feels distinctly different… Which is something that’s hard to say for a lot of these types of games on the App Store.

The goal of Amazing Breaker is to use a variety of bombs to destroy the ice sculptures that make up each level. Aside from the standard bomb that explodes on contact, there’s two variations of bombs that split into three smaller bombs, and a “ghost bomb" of sorts that can pass through the ice instead of hitting the edge. Using these explosives, you must destroy at least 90% of the ice to go on to the next level. Also, as you blow up the ice, realistic looking cracks form to provide a surprising amount of graphical flair to the game.

The sculptures that make up each level not only look cool, but are all shaped differently to become increasingly difficult to destroy. Early levels are very straight forward, and can all be clear with simple straight-on shots to a (mostly) solid block of ice. Later levels, however, require carefully placed shots that bounce off the side of the play area to reach a particularly vulnerable spot on the ice to cause maximum damage.

Much like Angry Birds and other similar games, getting three stars on a level can require quite a bit of trial and error, especially later in the game. If you don’t get the initial shot perfectly, you might as well start over, which brings me to my only real gripe about Amazing Breaker: Load times. Each time you retry a level to perfectly aim that first shot, you need to sit through the same loading screen that you did when you loaded the level for the first time. While the load times aren’t particularly bad, it feels like when you’re shooting for three stars you spend more time waiting for the game to load to try again than you do actually playing.

I suppose this load time “problem" will only be an issue for the obsessive three-star-hungry players out there. If you’re exceedingly patient, or don’t often find yourself endlessly retrying levels in games like this to perfectly clear each level, Amazing Breaker is an effortless recommendation.