Breakout
The classic brick breaker, rebuilt for the browser. Move the paddle, keep the ball alive and smash your way through five increasingly frantic levels of bricks — free, no install, no account.
▶ Play Breakout
The setup: three lives, five brick walls
Every run gives you three lives and a fixed sequence of five levels. Losing the ball doesn’t send you back to a random spot — the paddle recenters, the ball drops back onto it, and you launch again with a small random angle so no two serves fly identically. Level 1 is a full 10-column, 5-row wall to warm up on. Level 2 opens gaps down the sides across six rows. Level 3 seeds hard grey bricks into the corners. Level 4 narrows the wall into a diamond shape, and level 5 arranges a diagonal checkerboard of grey bricks — the toughest layout in the game. Clear all five and you get a “You Win!” screen; run out of lives at any point and it’s game over. Either way your final score is checked against your personal best, which lives in your browser’s local storage and shows on the HUD as soon as you beat it.
How the bounce actually works
This isn’t a coin-flip bounce — where the ball touches the paddle directly sets the angle it leaves at. Hit dead center and it goes almost straight back up; hit it near either edge and it can fly off at up to roughly a 72-degree angle from vertical. That means the paddle is a steering wheel, not just a wall: to reach bricks tucked in a corner, you deliberately catch the ball with the leading edge of the paddle instead of squaring up under it.
Reading the grey bricks
Most bricks break in one hit and disappear immediately with a little burst of particles in their color. Grey (“hard”) bricks are different: they show up grey while still at full health, and the moment they take their first hit, they flip to the row’s actual color to signal “one more.” A colored brick that used to be grey is worth finishing off — and worth double the points of a normal brick, since it scores for both hits it took.
How to play
- Launch. Press Space, click, or tap while the ball is resting on the paddle to send it off at a slight random angle.
- Move the paddle. On desktop, follow the mouse or hold the left/right arrow keys. On mobile, drag a finger anywhere on the board — the paddle tracks it directly.
- Aim with contact point. Center hits go up; edge hits go sideways. Use that to route the ball toward bricks a straight shot would miss.
- Finish the grey ones. They take two hits and change color after the first — track which ones are already cracked.
- Clear every brick to advance. The level ends the instant the last brick is gone, with a short “Level Clear!” splash before the next wall loads.
- Don’t let it drop past the paddle. That costs a life; lose all three and the run ends, but restarting is instant.
Tips for a high score
- Use the edge deliberately. Since the bounce angle is set by exactly where the ball meets the paddle, drifting to catch it off-center is how you clear bricks in corners, not luck.
- Watch for the speed jump. Once a level’s brick count drops to a quarter of its starting total, the ball gets a noticeable speed boost on top of the per-level increase — expect it and widen your reaction margin rather than getting caught off guard.
- Prioritize cracked grey bricks. A hard brick that has already flipped from grey to its row color only needs one more clean touch — that's a safer point of focus than a fresh two-hit brick.
- Plan around the diamond levels. Levels 4 and 5 leave empty columns on the sides, so the ball can slip past where you’d expect a wall — don’t assume the layout is symmetric under pressure.
- Chase level-clear bonuses. Finishing a level adds a bonus on top of individual brick points, and that bonus scales with the level number — surviving to level 5 is worth meaningfully more than repeating level 1.
Good to know: Breakout runs entirely in your browser with plain Canvas and JavaScript — nothing to download, no account, no data leaves your device. Your high score is stored locally using your browser’s storage. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything?
No. Breakout runs in any modern browser on desktop or mobile, with no downloads and no account required.
Can I play on my phone?
Yes. The paddle is fully touch-controlled — drag a finger anywhere on the board to move it, and tap to launch the ball.
How many levels and lives are there?
Five levels, each with its own brick layout, and three lives per run. The ball speeds up a little with every level and again once a level is mostly cleared.
What do the grey bricks do?
They take two hits instead of one. They stay grey while at full health and switch to their row’s color after the first hit, so you can tell at a glance which ones are almost broken.
Does my high score save?
Yes, your best score is saved in your browser automatically and shown on the HUD every time you play.
Is it free?
Yes, Breakout is completely free to play, with no limits on how many times you can retry.