Fun yet frustrating. Has its moments but I'm still undecided whether it's worth it.
+ I guess the best way to describe this is a trippy version of Pong. You control a paddle that has to deflect colored blocks that are moving from the right side of the screen to the left. The thing is, there are a number of different blocks that move in different patterns. So some move really fast, some move really slow, some move straight, some bounce off walls, some move in a sinusoidal wave, some have staggered movements. The other thing is that every contact with a block is synchronized with the bitwise music. So it involves a lot of hand-eye coordination as well as a good sense of rhythm to help guide your paddle. At times this can be real fun and rewarding (when you're doing good), but if you get hit with a real hard pattern of blocks that seem to be misleading and flying all over the place then you will easily miss a ton of blocks in a row and the game will be over. The problem is that a lot of the patterns that you should move the paddle involve small up-down movements. It's hard to recognize these at first, and you can either keep playing a level over again until you recognize it or you can watch a video online of someone else playing the level and see what pattern you should follow. Overall, I'm not really sure whether I found it really fun or whether it was unnecessarily difficult. There are certainly a lot of moments where I got really mad, so it's probably not a game for everyone.
Story/Presentation: (N/A)
Graphics: 2/5
+ I really don't mind the 8-bit graphics. I actually enjoyed them and thought that the 8-bit audio and the 8-bit graphics worked really well together. What I didn't like was when you fill up a meter after hitting a certain number of blocks in a row, then you go into sort of a super multiplier mode where every block hit (whether it's off the top of the screen, the bottom of the screen, or your paddle) produces a very, very annoying and distracting effect that makes it almost impossible to see what is happening on screen. Also, there were a number of times when the background was moving around, being distracting and I couldn't distinguish which colored blocks were flying at me since they blended with the background. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but it made everything so much harder for no good reason (which is confusing because I assumed it was supposed to be a reward for hitting a certain number of blocks in a row).
Value: 2/5
+ I managed to beat the game in a little under 3 hours. There are only three levels and each lasts 15 minutes. According to current Steam stats, roughly 48% of the players who own the game have beaten the first level and only 1.7% have beaten all three levels. This should tell you that the game is pretty challenging, and only a few will stick it out and beat the game. I'm just disappointed that the first level was really easy, the second level was pretty hard, and the third level was a little less hard. After you figure out the pattern and manage to beat all three levels, though, there really isn't much to do. You can try to get a higher score in a certain level since there are leaderboards, but that's about all. For a $10 price that's asking a lot and not really delivering that much. It might be really fun and rewarding for some, but I think most people won't enjoy it.