There are ‘laser’ powerups and bullet powerups. You can use the laser to blast through big columns of blocks, and or at least weaken them until your shots kill them with bounces. It introduces an interesting tension between wanting nice horizontal bounces versus wanting to hit as many blocks as possible with the laser. Fun stuff.
I think you have to accept that some starts are better than others. If you get no powerups on the first screen you're going to struggle. I think you're right that the middle game is quite easy (i.e. you can just bounce off a wall and clear the screen pretty easily). At higher levels you have to plan a bit more, and get really good at hitting corners to achieve horizontal bounces, which is hard to do reliably. It was certainly worth a weekend of my life, anyway. :)
