This Balatro-like take on Breakout trades a paddle for a revolver, and I've had a lot of fun combo'ing bullet configurations even if I wish this was more on target

There can be something soothing about Breakout as the ball bounces between paddle and brick to clear a stage. But at other times, when you just miss a simple shot, it can be infuriating. Kill the Brickman is the answer to that, removing the paddle from your hand and replacing it with a gun – aren't you tired of being nice?

In Kill the Brickman, each wave of brick walls aren't abstract. No, they hide a veritable invasion of the titular men, their block-headed shapes slotting right beside stone, metal, and more. Working your way through an escalating series of layouts, your mission objectives can slightly vary but all boil down to – well – killing the brickmen. Load ammo into your revolver, twirl it around to take aim, and blow those bricks to shreds, earning enough cash to polish up your sidearm to wreak more destruction in the next level.

Brick and mix

Developed by Doonutsaur and publisher by Poncle Presents, you can definitely feel Kill the Brickman has the shared desire to reach a chaotic flow state as in the latter's breakout (ahem) hit Vampire Survivors. Late in runs as you blast away at multi-brick mid-bosses, crack whole waves with only your first chamber, and watch multi-bounce bullets tear everything on-screen to shreds, it has an energy that can match up.

Here, though, Kill the Brickman follows a more Balatro-like structure to working through runs and improving your precious revolver. Before each round, you've a chance to visit a shop to buy upgrades, and to take on challenges that usually enhance the difficulty of what's to follow in exchange for more gold or guaranteed types of items showing up in the shop. Often, though, these can feel a little unnecessary, or can be confusingly explained – especially when it comes to facilities (tiles that can offer bonuses each round when you touch them, basically).

What needs little explanation is the action itself. Bullets can always bounce between targets a little bit, and have their own default starting power to whittle down the remaining health of bricks or brickmen. Three colors make up your arsenal: green corrosive bullets can deal damage-over-time, red explosive bullets explode when they make contact with a brickman (and can hit multiple times), and blue bullets clone themselves with each brickman they hit to create pinball-style multiball hordes. More can be bought in the shop, often with extra abilities of their own, from bricking up your own defence from Brickman attacks, to ones that permanently gain attack power with each kill.

Chambers, meanwhile, can be switched out each time you reload your gun. Each one bestows buffs if you fulfill the conditions of bullet types to fill them with, such as increasing the attack power or number of bounces. The starting chamber, for instance, does so when you slide in two pairs of different colored bullets in an alternating pattern. Others may require all of the same color, or a different combination altogether. Curiously, bits of the HUD count as bounceable material, meaning even if you focus on just one or two chambers to upgrade (an optimum strategy for ones you can easily fill for solid bonuses), you'll want to nab as many as possible to fill the sinkhole at the bottom of the screen.

Even though I've only played a few hours so far, enough to clear the first run (subsequent runs adds new rules and configurations), optimum play seems a little obvious to me if you're lucky enough to get the right upgrades – items that can earn you high amounts of shield per turn to protect from incoming Brickman attacks, while increasing the length and damage of your bullet combos.

On the other hand, though, if you miss building that momentum it can get punishing in ways that feel more annoying than challenging with inflated Brickman health and constant spawning of new bricks – you're iced out to die a slow death rather than just quickly failing, which can be disheartening. It's not helped by some odd bugs that can result in wasted shots with strange collisions or, one time, in Endless mode, the continual promise I had one more Brickman left to kill but it would never actually reduce, leaving me to engineer my own death.

Kill the Brickman just doesn't give you a lot of control. Breakout has you slide the paddle back and forth. Balatro challenges you to build strong enough poker hands. Vampire Survivors is constantly having you weigh up the risk and rewards of where you move. In Kill the Brickman, it feels like you just aim, shoot, and pray it works out on subsequent bullet bounces. You can sort of try to aim in holes, ideally taking out Brickmen about to launch an attack before they can get to you, but so many upgrade pathways revolve around mitigating having to think about those interactions altogether.

The same goes for Brickmen in later run types who have more complicated effects, like rats who cause other brickmen to move away, phone users who block the first hit they take, or others who spawn traps when they die. What does it matter if they're mostly all going to die when the bricks start flying anyway, and when realistically there's little you can do tactically to avoid hitting one in particular? Blasting on the bricks can be a lot of fun when it works and you get a solid run going, and while applying it to the Breakout formula is a neat twist with quirky presentation, I can better scratch the run-based roguelike itch elsewhere – I'm holstering this one for now.

Vampire Survivors kicked off a game development gold rush, but has a legitimately new genre emerged between the cash-ins?