Created by a single person as a passion project, Rebound Raver is a breakout / arkanoid styled game with a pinball twist. The game also brings to the table an electronica soundtrack and a reactive light show to make your arcade experience feel bright and bold. Rebound Raver is cheap – but definitely cheerful.
If you haven’t played a Breakout game before – these see you play as a bat on the edge of a screen to bash a ball into objects and break them. Once everything is broken, the level is over but you must keep your balls in play. Rebound Raver gives you 50 levels where you are inside a pinball/fruit machine hybrid with bright lights and pinball buzzers everywhere. Whilst you need to clear the gems, you’ll spend as much time interacting with all the bounce blocks, chutes and hitting switches to open doors to access more gems. On some levels, you’ll also be able to use pinball flippers to flick the ball into certain spaces. It is a great mash-up of genres that works excellently. The flippers do seem to have a slight delay to them though so beware when you play.
As you play, DJ Yan provides a rave, dance and techno soundtrack in the background. This keeps you engaged alongside the way how everything pinball related you touch emits lights or sound. Rebound Raver knows that an old classic needs some bells and whistles to stand out and it does that by trying to wow you each time something happens. This keeps moving forward through the levels. During each level, you’ll unlock a variety of powerups but I found that most of them would often be negative. This is because often gems are quite close to the bat and changing the parameters of your play throws you off your game. The exception to this is the powerful multiball – a staple of all breakout style games.
One word of caution for the game is that the controller controls are broken on launch. Use the mouse only. The controller analogue stick doesn’t seem to understand what speed to move your bat at and so it keeps it at a constant pace. This means you need to stay directly under the ball as you can’t outrun the ball. Playing with a mouse allows that reactive gameplay as the bat moves with the speed of your mouse movement. There is also the ability to left or right click to raise the edge of the bat to catch a ball. This works on a basic level but I did find that sometimes the precision of the ball physics felt random. I expected the ball to react one way and it’d do something different. After several hours of playing, I still didn’t feel I understood the ball physics at all. Don’t come to Rebound Raver for precision – come for the party.
Thankfully, everything else here makes up for that lack of consistency. Its bright, bold, loud aesthetic and reactive feedback keeps you entertained enough at just £2, this punches above many other breakout clones priced higher. Let’s party like 1995 again.
Review copy provided by developer.
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