"Triangle man, triangle man, triangle man hates particle man..."
-They Might Be Giants
In a world overrun by games trying desperately to top each other with the most spectacular graphics ever seen and letting gameplay die forgotten, Icebreaker is a breath of fresh air. This first PC game from Magnet Interactive takes a positively minimalist approach to its graphic presentation, and you never feel cheated. You're too busy running for your life to feel cheated.
There is no elaborate backstory to Icebreaker, there are no Dantean demons to fight, no complicated puzzles to solve. Your entire mission can be summed up in three words that sound like a 50's sci-fi flick set in ancient Egypt:
DESTROY ALL PYRAMIDS!
Y'see, pyramids are bad. Don't worry about why, they just ARE, okay? While there are a wide range of enemies and obstacles to conquer with many different strategies and properties, they're pretty much all pyramids of different colors. Even you, the player, are controlling a pyramid! But don't worry, yours is completely different from all those other nasty, evil pyramids. Yours is white and lying on its side.
You navigate this wedge through a forest of stationary pyramids, which as you may recall are EVIL AND MUST BE DESTROYED! There's a blaster in the tip of your cone, so fire when ready! Unfortunately, there are a few kinds of pyramids that are immune to the blaster. It works great against the red ones, they just boil away. But the blue ones just sit there and scoff at your firepower. To get rid of them, you have to run 'em through, and they shatter like glass. But don't try that trick with the red ones, or you'll die. Then there's the green ones. You can't do a darn thing with the green ones. You have to trick your enemies into destroying them for you.
Sure, enemies. You didn't think all the pyramids just sat there, did you? No, you're being pursued by another crew of pyramid bad-guys. On the bright side, they destroy any green pyramids they run into. Unfortunately, they can also destroy YOU if they touch you. The first of these mobile adversaries are the yellow ones. They're dumb as a sack of hammers, but can still kill you if they catch you. Almost anything stops these guys: non-green stationary pyramids, pits, rocks...As you move up the levels, you will encounter pyramids that can go around different obstacles or put on big bursts of speed. These moving pyramids don't just go away when you shoot them, either. They regenerate on the edge of the playing field and start moving in for the kill again. You can only really destroy the moving pyramids after wiping out all the stationary ones.
Since all these different critters look like differently colored pyramids, it can be hard to keep track of which color means what and who's going down. To make this easier, the first thirty levels of the game are sort of introductory, and every time a new element is added to the mix, you get to watch a cool Quick Time movie illustrating that the purple pyramids make pits when they get shot, or whatever. All told there are 150 play levels in Icebreaker.
To get much fun out of this game, it's important to set the difficulty level high enough to really challenge you. If you aren't really running for your life, destroying the 100 or more pyramids on each level will just feel tedious. On the other hand, if you've got enough bad guys coming at you, this game will really have you on the edge of your seat, getting really fed up when you do something STUPID and die, SMACKING that restart key... in other words, it's addictive as hell.
If 150 levels are somehow not enough for you, you punishment glutton, the package also contains a level editor called Icemaker. Create your own devastating levels! Share them with your friends! Put 500 frigging pyramids down for all I care, man, it's your call.
Okay, Icebreaker is really basic. But strangely enough, it's also kind of elaborate about detail. Even though the bad guys are all pyramids, this is still an SVGA game. Sometimes you get swirling vortices instead of normal pits, the enemy pyramids all bend and swerve on their way to attack you, all the pyramid colors die in unique ways. This product was not just tossed onto the shelves to get the Magnet name out there. It's something they have every right to be proud of, and will particularly appeal to fans of Zoop and Tetris looking for a new fix.
