Back in the early days of gaming, copying the design of popular titles was a surprisingly common practice. Plenty of gamees on early consoles cribbed elements from titles like Pong and Pac-Man, but as time waned on, knock-offs became less common. Still, one game that continued to have quite a few copycats after the early days was Breakout, to the point I’d almost hesitantly say “Breakout clone” might be a niche genre. The game style certainly has a bit of room to evolve, you can add quite a bit to the simple task of hitting a ball with a paddle to break blocks, and that’s where we find ourselves with the Game Gear title Devilish.

Devilish tries to take the Breakout formula and turn it into more of an adventure. The first ingredient for doing so is an utterly ridiculous set-up, where a prince and princess have been turned into a pair of paddles by an evil demon and must hit a ball around to defeat the demon and his forces. It’s silly, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the absurdity of it.

To progress in Devilish, you need to knock the ball around levels populated not just with blocks to break but villains and traps as well, the game even twisting your path to the sides to make it more like exploring a location than just progressing through linked together screens. A few power-ups crop up as well that can help clear the screen or briefly power up your ball, so hitting the right things can pay off in very nice ways. So long as the ball never goes below your bottom paddle you’re safe, but the game is competently designed to keep you on your toes even when your paddle mostly fills the bottom of the rather small screen. The two paddles you are given to control have different properties, the bottom one (the prince) moving around only on the X axis as your reliable defense against death, while the top one (the princess) can move forward and back in addition to side to side. This essentially sets it up as the attack paddle, the top paddle able to cover quite a bit of the screen so that it can push the ball around to better battle enemies and break durable blocks. You can even change the arrangement of your paddles to better fit certain situations, such as a not-so-great split option for your defense paddle and orienting the top paddle to face left or right for when the action starts moving horizontally. You can usually get along fine with the default set-up save those horizontal moments, but the issue with shifting your paddle arrangement is not the utility of it but the fact it’s connected all to one button. You have to cycle through the paddle arrangements in a set order, making it a bit annoying when you want to shift to another form in a hurry. This discourages their use a bit further, but it’s only a minor annoyance when it’s time for you to shift things around.

The bigger annoyance is that the top paddle has some pretty bad issues with collision detection. Since you can move the paddle through things and above the ball while it’s in motion, certain parts of it aren’t completely solid. When the ball needs to pass through the bottom of the paddle this is fine, but at other times you seem to have it arranged properly only to see the ball pass through and do its own thing. Having the left or right facing setting for the paddle comes with similar problems as you can’t guarantee a hit unless its dead center on the “surface” side of the paddle. The defense paddle can usually pick up the slack in keeping the ball in play, but the limited screen real estate does mean its quite easy for a ball to suddenly bounce into a troubling situation when the top paddle fails as its job.

It’s likely these issues would only be minor gripes if not for the game’s biggest flaw: a timer. Even though there is a time trial mode where you can try and set a time as the main challenge, the main game of Devilish has every level set to a clock that is counting down to zero. If you run out of time, you die and have to start the stage over again. Devilish gives you a few balls and the chance to earn more, but between your regular deaths in the stage and the timer, you might have to start chewing through continues to keep going. I’m fairly sure the timer was put in place to encourage a more aggressive approach to the game, the time limit requiring you to get in there with the top panel and really push your ball into bad guys and roadblocks, but dying normally already adds enough risk to the affair. The time is by no means lenient, usually ranging between 1 and 2 minutes for a stage and peaking at 3 minutes and 30 seconds for the final level. Levels can be pretty short to make up for this, but if there is a boss in that stage, the timer is needlessly cruel. Trying to angle the ball to hit the boss the requisite amount of times before being timed out is sometimes a crapshoot, with the luck of the bounce sometimes being too necessary to succeed. The final boss especially plays into that issue, having moments where its small weak spot is unreachable just to put icing on that terrible cake.

I realize asking for more control in a game that’s all about bouncing a ball and seeing what happens might sound silly, but Devilish’s design seems to demand it at times. A brief unlucky moment where the ball just won’t cooperate shaves time off the timer that could be necessary to have a hope of beating a boss or reaching the end before you’re abruptly killed, and it’s not very enjoyable to be under a time crunch you’re hardly capable of handling. Devilish got most of its style right, with lovely areas, good tunes, and some unique enemies and traps in your path, but it’s hard to enjoy that all when your eyes are focused on a ball and a timer that are working together to drag the experience down.

THE VERDICT: It’s really strange to find a game where removing one part of the game could improve it greatly, but Devilish manages to have a flaw that obvious. Devilish sets up an adventure with the basic thrill of breaking blocks and nurturing a ball to keep it in play coupled well with interesting environments and living obstacles, but the timer ticking away at the top left of the screen makes it so you can’t enjoy it at your own pace. Surprisingly, the Time Trial mode is less of a time crunch, counting up instead for the sake of the record screen but at the same time not giving you the full game’s content so you can’t truly substitute it for the main game. What we’re left with is a game that could have been decent or even good if not for the developer forcing a style of play on the player by way of harsh limitation.

And so, I give Devilish for the Game Gear…

A BAD rating. By forcing artificial difficulty and artificial length with a surprisingly strict timer that will force the player to push through the same environments again and again, Devilish buries its better parts under a race against the clock you aren’t quite equipped to handle. It’s not quite clear if you’d need any skills beyond good reaction times to succeed at a regular block-breaking game, but Devilish tried to introduce some twists to it that it pushed too hard by pushing the player too hard. Strip out the timer and you’ve got some cute little environments to bust your way through and some bosses that could be a good challenge if you weren’t guaranteed to have less than two minutes to whittle them down. The paddle arrangement even opened up new opportunities, but they were immediately squandered by the lack of reliability with the top paddle. Some overly aggressive and lucky play can carry you through though, and when the pressure isn’t too great, Devilish shows the promise it had with a decent enough twist on Breakout’s formula. No timer and a more clearly defined top paddle would have at least made this game worthy of some consideration.

Perhaps the warning was in the title all along. Devilish is unfortunately a devilish twist on the block-breaker formula despite some of its delightful elements.