Breakout clones have been a computing staple since the earliest days of TV consoles. So it's not surprising to see yet another variant hit the Ovi Store. In this case it's 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2, featuring psychedelic effects and more power-ups than you can imagine. But is it any good as a game?

You know the basic game, of course. Move your paddle to the right and left, keeping a bouncing ball in play and knocking out all the bricks in the playing area. Decent implementations of the game have the subtlety that each part of the paddle bounces the ball off at a different angle, giving the flexibility to adjust the ball's trajectory and finish off those last few stubborn blocks. And indeed 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 has this.

The traditional way to spice up this competent but rather staid gameplay is to add power-ups. Multi-ball, unstoppable balls, larger and smaller paddles, extra lives, and so on. And yet again 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 has these.

So - how to go one better? What about making the playing field pseudo 3D in that there's parallax scrolling as you move left and right, with a fake 'z' axis effects and a psychedelic pulsing background? Check. What about including powerups that go above and beyond the call of duty, such as nuclear bombs, laser beams, machine guns? Check (you can choose which ones to use, should you have 'caught' more than one, using '2' and '8' on your phone's keypad).

What about using the aforementioned 3D system to implement such negative powerups as 'drunk mode', where the whole playing field wobbles around unpredictably? What about ripping off the best bit of Mile High Pinball, where your ball can travel 'up' to the next level under certain conditions? Check. Check. Check.

Now throw in automatically-variable difficulty levels, animated menus and end-of-level 'bosses'. And add in three separate playing modes:

• 'Revolution' (with everything but the kitchen sink)
• 'Classic' (with most of the above but a more conventional level structure, no bosses and less leaping from level to level)
• 'Time attack' (as it sounds, you're given a set time - 100 seconds - and then you work your way through each level - you lose time for missing the ball and you gain time for making it through a level. If you're good enough, you can go on for ever, in theory!!)

Add it all up and you've understandably got the most feature-packed, gizmo-equipped Breakout game ever devised. Bar none. The only worry should be whether there's so much complexity here that the game player will be overwhelmed.

Well, I've got good news and bad news for you. Which would you like first? The good? 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 is extremely playable. The handling of on-screen pop-up effects, powerups, bonuses, visual effects and so on, is exemplary - while playing you simply get your head down and play, without worrying too much (or having time to worry) about long term strategy, it's simply an actionfest and that's how I like my games.

The bad news is that, this being a Java title and sadly not a native Symbian game, there are limits to 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2's performance. There's a lot going on at all times on the screen and the frame rate on my Nokia N96 was down to about 6 or 7 frames per second, noticeably slow and jerky and unpleasant. Thankfully, Nokia tweaked the Java runtime for subsequent devices (and it's worth noting that the N96 was underclocked a little in the first place). I also installed 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 on the Nokia N86 8MP, another button-based S60 3rd Edition FP2 smartphone and had much better results. On the N86 8MP, I'd estimate the frame rate to be between 10 and 15 frames per second - a little jerky, but not noticeably so - and the game was therefore far more playable and exciting.

If you have a different device, including touchscreen phones like the 5800 and N97, and are worried about performance then note that there's a demo version of the previous Brick Breaker game in the Ovi Store. You can install this and try out the frame rate of the basic engine - moving onto buying 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 if Java's performance on your handset is good enough.

There's a suitable digital music soundtrack, which can thankfully be turned off when in public, plus attractively animated 'robot' menus which do a pretty good job of disguising the game's Java nature.

The use of an auto-difficulty system, meaning that the game gets harder as you get better at it, will infuriate gaming purists, but it's how I programmed many of my own games in the past and it basically means that more people will have more fun with it for longer without having to fiddle with settings themselves. The bottom line is that I really enjoyed bouncing, blasting and nuking my way through level after level of eye-searing colours during the course of the review. So, despite the worries over frame rate, I'm giving 3D Brick Breaker Revolution 2 a cautious thumbs up.

Steve Litchfield, Ovi Gaming, 12 May 2010