Diamonds 3D

Overview

Breakout games are one of the most popular forms of action arcade games on the computer, and many outstanding commercial and shareware games exist in this category. But most of these are fundamentally two-dimensional experiences, with your paddle at the bottom of the screen, the bricks at the top of the screen, and the ball bouncing in between the two. At the end of last year, WizardWorks released Diamonds 3D, one of the very few true three-dimensional breakout games and certainly by far the best. The game did not attract much notice then, either in reviews or in sales, and in many areas this game has only now surfaced in software stores (before the rush of Christmas releases) for the very first time, so it seemed worth a look.

Gameplay, Graphics, Audio

In this exciting three-dimensional game, your paddle is in the front of the screen and the bricks are in the back of the screen. It takes real skill to adjust quickly to a ball coming toward you at different speeds when bouncing off objects at different angles. Diamonds 3D contains 50 levels of gameplay, each with distinctive challenges. On each level, you must first remove color bricks with a ball of the same color; from level 3 on, to do this you must first hit color energizer bricks to change the color of the ball. After removing the color bricks, you may then get rid of the diamond bricks underneath. Some levels have key bricks that give you keys to unlock locked bricks, plain bricks that cannot be removed, and magic bricks that create unpredictable effects. There is even a limited save capability at certain points in the game.

The game play in this game is both fun and challenging. The graphics are truly excellent—clear and colorful—and the sound effects are unbelievably wonderful (someone really took special effort to make the sounds here exquisite, well beyond anything you would expect in this kind of game). The music is fine, but it seems a bit frugal to have only one background song for all 50 levels.

System Requirements

The minimum system requirements for Diamonds 3D are a 486 DX/66 CPU, 8 MB RAM, 2 MB hard disk space, a CD-ROM drive (for installation only), a mouse, a video card and monitor supporting SVGA graphics, a sound card, and Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 as the operating system. By today’s standards, these are extremely modest requirements.

Bottom Line

When I first encountered this game, I expected very little because I have seen practically every twist on the breakout genre. But I found myself totally sucked in and absorbed by the 3D action, great graphics, and superb sound effects. While this is clearly much simpler fare than most of the commercial releases these days (WizardWorks specializes in the release of budget-priced games), I highly recommend it to arcade action enthusiasts who want a very pleasant diversion—you may find it next to impossible to "break out" from it.