Kickstarter Shout-out: Mathbreakers!

The Kickstarter/indie scene seems to be hitting the fatigue stage of funding, due to many genres that were once niche genres becoming more commonplace. Kickstarter projects need to be more diverse and unique than ever now, if they want to reach their funding goals. Heck, I am thinking of writing up an article about what I find to be an appealing Kickstarter page at a later date. One kind of game I don’t see getting represented a lot in the Kickstarter scene is the edutainment genre. With the recent success of the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, which is really awesome, I decided to begin my epic quest of finding an educational video game that looked fun! My quest for a new edutainment title didn’t take long because I found this interesting little project called Mathbreakers! I wanted to write about this game because it brought back the days of playing Math Blaster and other educational video games that were made to help me learn, but have a fun experience at the same time. Let us crunch some numbers and dive into Mathbreakers.


Mathbreakers is an action adventure edutainment game where you will traverse across the land solving math puzzles. The wide range of the way Mathbreakers teaches kids about one of students’ least popular homework assignments is rather impressive. Instead of just making a bright colorful math book, they made an entire fantasy adventure around it. You will have a projectile weapon or a sword that you will use to solve a range of puzzles that are in the form of math problems. For example, one of the animated gifs on the Mathbreakers Kickstarter page shows off the player encountering a wall that is made of ‘-1’ blocks. Now then, how will the player solve this conundrum? They would throw a sphere that had the number one on it at the wall, destroying the blocks that prevent the player from progressing. You get it? One minus one equals zero! The Kickstarter also includes animated gifs that show that the player will need to use the sword weapon to cut the spheres to make them into quarter and half spheres to get past other challenges that lay in front of him. So far, I love what I have seen since it feels like an actual game, and like I said above, isn’t a flashy interactive calculator!


In terms of graphics, the game looks okay. The graphics shown in the Kickstarter video are primitive and are probably not finished, but I don’t really care. Sure, for the most part, I want a game’s finished graphical look to be good enough to where it isn’t an overarching problem throughout the entire game, but I think the graphics aren’t a big deal for this game. They get the job done and make way for the more important part of the game, which is the math-solving gameplay.


In the end, I am glad I found out about this game because even if I am not in the age group this game is being developed and marketed for, it looks like a fun puzzle game. Another reason to support this Kickstarter is that it’s going to a good cause in helping kids improve their math skills in a more entertaining way. Plus, the video shows that the people behind this project have brought the prototype to different schools, and have gotten positive results from the students there. As of writing this article, the game is halfway through its funding and I hope it makes its goal!

(if you would like to support this Kickstarter, go to this link!)