You still might end up with tiny bricks in odd spots that you just can’t seem to hit, but clearing the field can go a lot quicker since you can get a good bounce going that will devastate the upper area. The bricks at the top of the screen you are meant to break aren’t cleanly segmented, meaning that when the ball hits into them, it can do a surprising amount of damage. The issue with the staff colors everything else in Off the Wall poorly, and that’s a shame, as there is certainly potential to this Breakout clone. A poor salve for the fact the ball mostly slips past you due to the game’s quirks. Much like most Breakout games, once the ball gets past that paddle, you’ve lost, but Off the Wall does give you a few lives to ensure things won’t end too quickly. Too many times you’ll end up seeing the ball slide down the side of Lu because you weren’t able to tell the staff was slightly too small to bounce it back. Lu will lift his staff if it comes in from above and there seems to be a tad bit of leeway in that it can bounce off of it while it is at his side, but mostly it just means you don’t see the true length of your paddle save when it is in action, making it a bit difficult to gauge if you’re standing in the correct spot. Lu is the stand-in for Breakout’s paddle and not the best substitute honestly, as when the square pixel representing the ball comes towards him, he’s not totally reliable in his task of hitting it away from the bottom of the screen.
Once you start a round of Off the Wall, you’ll see you are playing as a small man named Lu on the bottom of the screen. If you start on a lower difficulty and do well enough, you even move up to the next difficulty, although the biggest difference to be found in the difficulties is that Peasant doesn’t immediately throw the annoying bird enemy into the mix. Despite being framed as difficulties, these are almost akin to the game’s stages, with Peasant, Student, and Master all containing sets of four playing fields each. Off the Wall starts by giving you a few difficulty choices, those being Peasant, Student, or Master, and the option to play with one or two players. Atari even got in on toying with the core concept a bit, and by giving the game a coat of Japanese paint, they hoped to create a Breakout clone that was different enough to justify a purchase despite being a somewhat familiar game. Breakout was still a break out hit when the Atari 2600 hit the scene and small iterations to the title’s brick-breaking formula would keep coming out for years.
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