If you’ve checked out the charts lately, you’ve likely seen yet another Ketchapp title glued to the #1 position. It’s called Ballz (Free) and like most other Ketchapp titles it’s loaded with ads that you need constantly wrestle with (unless you want to pay $1.99 for the ad-free unlock) to play a shockingly hard to put down game. The basic gist is that it’s a block breaker, but you need to hit blocks multiple times, indicated by the numbers on the blocks. For instance, the game starts with a bunch of “1" blocks, which only need to be hit once. You fling the ball up there, hit one, it disappears, and after your balls return to the bottom of the screen a new line of blocks falls down from the top (potentially with a “2" or “3" on them). Things continue from there, until one of the blocks hits the bottom of the screen.
What elevates this gameplay formula to a whole new level is that mixed in with the numbered blocks are extra balls which you keep for every shot. It doesn’t take long until you’re firing off a dozen balls, and having them bounce around like crazy, clearing double-digit blocks and a bunch more along the way. It’s like if you took the frantic nature of a typical block breaker when you’ve got a multi-ball power-up and built an entire game around it.
Of course, like most Ketchapp releases that get super popular, the internet is on fire trying to figure out what the original game is that explored this concept, as Ballz isn’t an original game by any means. Other similar titles that predate it include BBTAN by 111% (Free) which also isn’t original and Swipe Brick Breaker (Free) which might be the original (at least on mobile).
Covering these sort of ultra-simple games is always difficult as it’s often impossible to find the origin of the actual gameplay. While Swipe Brick Breaker seems to be the oldest iteration of this on the App Store, it’s entirely possible that that game is based on some obscure Flash game, game jam prototype, or something else. So, provided it doesn’t annoy you too much that Ballz is a bit clone-y, I’d still give it a look. Hell, the other two games I mentioned are free too, so there’s no harm in downloading all three of them to see which of these bouncy ball brick breaker games you like best.
