YMMV / Alpha Bounce

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Everywhere in the more hostile environments, whenever they're blocks that fire something at the paddle at a stupidly-fast speed, release an enemy or kill the paddle instantly.
  • In the DSI version, several types of enemies are hostile ships that are very small and hard to hit correctly with the ball. Even more frustrating since they can hide behind several layers of blocks and rain down bullets on you that often kill in three hits.
• Difficulty Spike: The early levels close to your spawn point have little to no hazards and rain down useful powerups, but as you begin to take on levels far from the starting point and the many planets, things take a turn for the worse as the game introduces blocks that can directly stun or kill the paddle in one clean shot, along with making helpful powerups more rare.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Alpha Bounce has a number of design choices which can easily confuse or frustrate the average Breakout or Arkanoid player.
  • The ball's speedup time is much quicker than most Breakout titles, which would keep the ball at a steady pace unless the player spent minutes clearing the board or got the ball into the higher portions of the board.
  • Being able to scroll the paddle completely offscreen- compared to other Breakout titles that block the paddle's movement from advancing off the edge.
  • Enemies that can directly kill the player. In most Breakout clones a minor enemy would only distort the ball's movement or fire a non-lethal projectile that would only stun the paddle at worst (or in rarer cases catch the ball and release it), with bosses the only type of object that can kill the player with projectiles.
  • Guardian and Death blocks. The former fires a fast-moving laser that is quite difficult to dodge, and the later which automatically causes the player's paddle to self-destruct it a ball strikes it. Kashuat Sentinels are also an honorable mention, as it fires eight red bullets at your paddle, which cause instant death.