36 years on and there’s still inspiration to be drawn from Breakout, Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game that helped define the very vocabulary videogames have been jabbering ever since.

A sort of inverse Peggle, with Bjorn the Unicorn swapped out for a missile-riding Tron nanobot, Reflect Missile does little to advance upon its primal inspiration’s simplistic visuals. Instead, it snuggles up to the primitive 8-bit aesthetic, placing cool monotone green or red Amstrad blocks atop school exercise-book graph-paper backgrounds and soundtracking them with chiptune lullabies. Only the tiniest flashes of contemporary flair are permitted here: fading missile trails that bisect the screen or pixel-art fireworks that bloom when a stage is completed.

No, at 500 DSi Points, Q-Games isn’t interested in turning Breakout into Virtua Tennis. Rather, it’s interested in taking Breakout, snapping it apart and putting it back together again with some of the pieces back to front.

The developers’ ability to take a building-block genre and simmer it down to a zingy concentrate has been proved time and again by way of its PixelJunk suite of titles on PlayStation 3, which have variously reduced and reshaped tower defence, racing and shoot-’em-ups. While Reflect Missile doesn’t bear the family name, it certainly shares the family likeness of its PSN cousins, adding a few precise rules and ideas to its inspiration to create something that’s at once entirely fresh yet entirely familiar.

You can rad the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here