247. BreakThru! (Shoeisha, Playstation, 1995)

Just like game #96, WildSnake, BreakThru! features prominent Russian architecture and Tetris designer Alexey Pajitnov on its cover, yet he had nothing to do with the game. Originally released on PCs in 1994, BreakThru! only shared a publisher with Tetris, but its gameplay is fundamentally different.

While both games feature a grid of blocks, BreakThru! starts you with a 15x15 grid full of blocks of 4 colors. You can select any groups of 2 or more of a color to destroy them, and the blocks above will fall down into the hole that was created. There is a 2 minute time limit, and new blocks are added, though at a relatively slow speed. Along with new blocks, you also get bomb or missile powerups that work to clear more blocks. It's not nearly as active as Tetris, but it comes together in a nice bubble wrap popping sort of way. 

BreakThru! includes various 2 player modes, as well as a single arcade mode to play through. The arcade mode takes you to various locations around the world and history where people were trying to break through walls. So one level might have you escaping through the Berlin wall, and in the next, you're sieging a British castle in medieval times. It's a neat enough framing device, and the music is nice enough, though the tracks tend to loop after about 30 seconds.

3/5, a decent but shallow tile dropping puzzle game