Brick breaking is one of the most successful casual game genres of all time. Of course, that’s in no small part due to Brick Breaker being the Solitaire of the BlackBerry. But there is still a huge amount of diversity in the genre, and here’s we’re looking at Click A Brick, a fast-paced installment of the brick breaking genre.

In Click A Brick, the player must click on multi-brick combinations to eliminate groups of bricks. If the player doesn’t click fast enough, the bricks will build up to the top of the screen, as they’re constantly falling from above (think Tetris, but faster and with far less strategy needed).

For a free online game, Click a Brick is pretty good. The graphics are sufficient, and the mechanism is a good time killer. Ultimately, there isn’t too much meat to the game other than being able to click really, really quickly. This makes the game somewhat less interesting than, say, Tetris.

Play Click a Brick for free below:

To continue our exploration of simple free flash racing games, Play Free Game Now takes a look at 3D Deathrace, a somewhat nontraditional “racing” game. First, there are no other racers here — it’s simply you and a bunch of trees. In addition, it’s unclear what the benefits of going fast are — other than the fact that it’s more fun that way.

Rather, 3D Deathrace resembles a cross-country obstacle course, with the objective being survival rather than fast completion of the track. In the game, the player pilots a motorcycle through a swamp-like forest (at least, that’s how it looks to me) in the middle of the night. It’s a strange experience made even stranger by the objects (fuel, repairs, money, nitro and “slow”) that you can pick up along the way. They pretty much all do what you would imagine — including “slow”, which temporarily slows your bike down and actually lets you get some control over what you’re doing.

All in all, this is one of the better racers we’ve profiled here at Play Free Game Now. It’s definitely nontraditional, but the motorcycle / swamp concept is a pretty interesting one. Just avoid the trees.

If you’d like to play 3D Deathrace for free, check it out below:

Racing games don’t have to be intense, Tokyo Drift-style ultra-realistic course racers. Free ones, especially, are typically not. Box Racing is a good example of this, and unless you’re looking for a hardcore street-racing feel, it’s worth a play.

Don’t get me wrong, free flash racing games can be very hit-or-miss. Especially simple, lo-fi ones like Box Racing. The controls can be shaky, the AI unbalanced and the graphics uninspired. Box Racing avoids most of these online game pitfalls, even poking fun at its own simple graphics with its name — the racers are, after all, vaguely colorful boxes.

One of the stranger aspects of the game is a series of “skill bars” that allow you to adjust your racer’s relative levels of health, top speed and “skill”. Top speed and health — the ability to stay alive while your racer hits walls, signs and other objects — is pretty straightforward. I could never quite figure out what “skill” was supposed to do — do let me know in the comments if you can figure it out.

The “health” aspect is a bit annoying, especially with respect to Box Racing’s controls. It’s tough to avoid hitting the sides of the track, and the “health” aspect seems to be a bit of a crutch to avoid building in a more complex damage system. It’s understandable, though — after all, the game is free, and has a fairly well-balanced AI.

If you’re looking to play a free online racing game, this is a simple and well-designed option. Check it out below to play.

Iron Serpent Screenshot

One of the largest and most specific genres in the free game world is the tower defense game. I’m generally a big fan of the tower defense genre, and there are some great examples of classic tower defense games available online to play for free. For some reason, most of the great examples of tower defense games are free and online. I’ll be sharing many of them with you. And also, obviously, are the bad examples. I’ll be sharing some of those with you too.

Iron Serpent Defense is not so much “bad” as it is “mediocre” or “vanilla”. The graphics are decent, and it adheres fairly well to the tower defense genre’s standards. The concept of buying upgrades and close integration with virtual currency is also cool. If you’d like to play it, just check out the SWF below.

However, the game is still somewhat uninspired. There’s nothing that strongly differentiates this game from other free online tower defense games — except perhaps for the concept that towers can be damaged by creeps, which I consider to be a major flaw and completely unexplainable by the minimal storyline. I haven’t quite figured out how to prevent towers from being damaged by creeps, which I believe obviates the need for it to happen at all. It also greatly discourages investment in upgrades, which is a fairly important part of any TD game.

Finally, the differentiation of creeps — into Toxic, Air, Earth and Fire — is somewhat interesting, but still not incredibly inspired as far as tower defense games go. Why don’t “Air” creeps, for example, completely fly over the maze, as do “flying” creeps in Paul Preece’s Tower Defense? All the creeps just kind of clunk along at the same rate, waiting to be shot by cookie-cutter, quasi-futuristic towers.

Sounds like a simple question, right? One could easily think of a meaning in terms of a circular definition: a game in which puzzles are solved. But doesn’t that definition fit many games out there, especially free flash ones? Is Closure, a game we profiled earlier, a platformer or a puzzle game? In a sense, it’s a little of both — but ultimately, it’s more a game of solving puzzles than jumping around various moving platforms. And it’s better because of it.

To get a sense of what I’m talking about, just check out the Puzzle game listings on Kongregate:

Listing of Puzzle Games on Kongregate

But many of the games listed above don’t fit into the traditional definition of a “puzzle” game. There are only “Logical or conceptual challenges”, a common term used in reference to puzzle games, to the extent that you find those challenges in almost any type of game. Halo 3, for instance, has a number of logical challenges — but it certainly isn’t commonly defined as a puzzle game, as there are already well-defined genres that are used to label it — action, shoot-em-up, et cetera.

So thus, the “Puzzle” genre gets co-opted for those fascinating, esoteric games — often free flash games — that don’t really fit into any other genre. For another example, see Obechi, a game we covered last week. There’s no more of a “logical or conceptual challenge” in Obechi than in Halo or Madden, but there’s no other commonly-adopted genre that can be used to define and tag a game centered around collecting balls with rings in an abstract, 2D space.