The title of this game, and therefore this review, is ridiculous.  Amusing, but ridiculous.  The downloaded app uses the name TBITF under its icon, and that’s how we will be referring to it from now on.  What we have here is a Breakout-style game for the iPhone, with a few tweaks to set it apart from others in the genre.

The first, and most obvious, is that you’re playing against someone else that is either controlled by another person, or by the AI.  Your bat is at the bottom of the screen, the other is at the top, there are two balls and a line of bricks in the center.  Behind each bat is a force field that will withstand a certain amount of hits before disappearing and letting the ball through, at which point it’s game over.

The bricks take the form of standard ones which are destroyed when hit, ones that return, ones that can’t be destroyed and so on.  When you hit the ball it can be ‘pushed’ with a tap of the screen to increase its speed, or given a little spin to confuse the other player.  Of course, as the blocks are destroyed, you will have the other player’s ball to deal with – and vice versa – too.

The more time you spend on a level, the faster the ball gets, eventually reaching  background-distorting fireball speeds, which when combined with some spin can be devilishly difficult to return!  The later levels contain other fiendish creations such as teleport holes too, providing a serious challenge.  It’s not just then either as although the easy setting is just that, the medium and hard difficulties should see you needing several attempts before passing a level, even early on.

The music deserves special mention here, as the main screen theme is a fantastic 8-bit piece that is much too short (perhaps ‘the music is too short’ should be added to the title too?), and while the in-game tracks don’t quite reach the same level of greatness, they’re still finger-tappingly enjoyable.  The whole look of TBITF owes plenty to 8-bit gaming, with a reliance of primary colors and simple shapes and designs, but it all works really well.  There are plenty of fun graphical touches too, and we especially love the way the ball stretches as it speeds up!

Playing on the iPhone requires a steady finger, as it’s rather easy for it to slip off the bottom of the screen, thereby watching the ball go sailing past as your bat just sits there.  With two players it’s surprisingly manageable, seeing as two people are playing together on such a small device.

However, where TBITF comes alive is playing two-player on the iPad.  Although it needs scaling up it still looks fine, and the rewards for doing so are great!  What started out as a quick try for the purposes of this review, turned into well over an hours play as we beat level after level, intrigued to find out what was coming next and enjoying the easy learning curve, responsive controls and the overall joy of local multi-player done right.

There are 35 levels to battle through and given its later difficulty, this should take a while, but we would like to see a few more in the future.  It’s also a real shame this wasn’t made as a universal app with native iPad support, as the tablet really is its natural habitat.

To get the most out of TBITF, it needs to be played with a friend, but the single player mode is still frantic fun too.  At $1.99/£1.19/€1.59 it’s reasonably priced and thanks to a some innovative level design, it’ll be a while before you complete it, so value is high.  We highly recommend this honest, enjoyable block-breaker, where the ball can get too fast, the game is never too slow, but the name certainly is too long!

Overall: 4/5.