Chico’s Rebound Review – Review

Chico’s Rebound is a charming Brick Breaker-style game with adventure and puzzle elements. It starts off with simple stages that will be familiar to any Arkanoid player, but the difficulty and variety ramp up quickly, making for a satisfying challenge overall. While its retro presentation harkens back to the days of the NES, the tweaks to a familiar genre make Chico’s journey feel unique.

In 2025, Ball X Pit took Brick Breaker gameplay and added roguelite progression to it; Chico’s Rebound opts for a multi-floor tower with individual stages, boss fights, and puzzles you need to solve to progress. There’s an initial approachability that makes it easy to get hooked in, but very quickly the bricks you need to break turn into patches of grass to be burned, seeds to be watered, and bombs to be detonated. By the third floor, I was already scratching my head and needing a few retries to finish every level.

The signature mechanics of Chico’s Rebound distinguish it from other Brick Breaker clones, and these include the ability to gather Chico’s ball (or walnut, in this case) and aim it wherever you choose, and the power to swing your tail to ricochet the ball so that you can keep the play going and potentially build up a score multiplier, which you’ll need to do in order to keep exploring the tower.

There are four types of currencies to collect, two of which allow you to keep moving up and up the tower. Keys won by solving puzzles act as intended, but each level also allows you to earn up to two coins that open up new stages and boss doors, with one coin awarded for simple completion and the other for reaching the high score target. Nearly every target score requires that you take advantage of an aforementioned mechanic: namely, the fact that the longer you keep the ball from getting past you, the higher your score multiplier (to a max of 10x). In a tough spot, you can also perform a desperation leap to try and prevent the walnut from slipping behind you and costing you one of your three lives. Optional gems open up bonus stages that really test your abilities, in addition to your patience, and the plentiful sunflower seeds you gather can be spent on cosmetics to change the appearance of menus or even Chico’s walnut.

The boss fights are genuinely novel and exciting, requiring all of the skill you’ve built up and mastery of the power-ups you encounter. One such fight takes place on a desert tile set against a skeletal octopus, and you need to alternate between water shots that grow plants and fire shots that ignite them and leave the boss vulnerable for a few seconds. Another tasks you with knocking a bomb-tossing villain off a ledge while contending with an ever growing wall of bricks that seek to shield him. It may actually help that you effectively need to have shown enough aptitude for the game to have earned two coins in most levels to unlock the boss doors because you’re gonna need that practice. One of the later bosses had an annoying bug where a grinding sound would continue to play if you failed the fight and had to restart, but that was the only real issue I encountered during my time with the game.

One look at Chico’s Rebound tickled the 8-bit nostalgia strings of this ‘80s kid, but I found a surprising amount of depth the more I played. There’s a light story and some cute characters, but these are window dressing for a challenging and satisfying block-breaking adventure that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Even if you’re only lightly interested in the genre, Chico’s Rebound is a standout that’s well worth a look.