NEON WIRE

Break things while you run

NEON WIRE is a breakout game that keeps moving forward.

The fun part is that the blocks don't really look like they're coming toward you. The floor grid and the wall lines stream away behind you, so it feels more like you're the one running — and the blocks up ahead are just what's standing in the road.

A neon-lit road, stretching off under a field of stars.

The lines wobble the whole time, the strokes double up and bleed a little, and there's a soft film grain over everything. Not a clean render: a wireframe world with some hand-drawn character left in it.

Every run turns out differently

Broken blocks spill XP gems. Gems don't get pulled toward you, so only the ones your paddle actually catches count. Miss one and it's gone — which makes the order you break things in part of the fun.

Each time you level up, you pick one of three cards.

• Five active weapons — Pierce, Multiball, Homing, Nova, Gravity. These change how the ball itself moves, and the effects get louder and shift colour as the level climbs
  
• Three passive dials — ball speed, paddle speed, paddle width. The card tells you which way it's going before you take it

If you don't like what you're offered you can reroll, and you can banish cards you never want to see again.

Some things you just dodge

Grey blocks can't be broken, no matter what. Depending on where they turn up, the ball won't save you — so the answer is to get the paddle out of the way.

That's where stretching and squashing the paddle comes in. Squeeze it thin and you can slip through narrow gaps, but you've got less to catch with. Widen it and you can reach further, but you're a bigger target for whatever's bearing down on you. It stretches upward by as much as it's squashed sideways, so what you see is always what you collide with.

Four modes

• EASY — 1,500m. The gentlest of everything, to get you started
  
• NORMAL — 3,000m. The standard run, and a good place to begin
  
• EXPERT — 6,000m. Tougher blocks, more unbreakables, and much rougher slopes and curves
  
• ENDLESS — No finish line. It starts out the calmest of the four, but the volume and the toughness keep climbing until it ends up the hardest of them all

Best scores are kept separately for each mode.

Also

• 14 achievements
  
• English / Japanese
  
• Full controller support, and you can rebind the keyboard too
  
• Three separate volume sliders, adjustable effect intensity, and scanlines and grain you can turn off