Do you remember the good old days of gaming? When arcades were everywhere, not just in small seaside resorts, and Atari were the kings of the home console market? Well, I don’t. The perks of being young, I guess. However, I have played a lot of those old arcade games when they came to consoles.
This brings me to Adamvision Studios and Sneakybox’s Centipede: Recharged (CR). A reimagining of the classic 1981 Atari arcade game. The objective is simple; survive against the constant stream of bugs that fill the screen by shooting them before they hit you. However, there are a ton of mushrooms blocking your shots if you’re not accurate enough.
CR’s mechanics are very similar to Space Invaders, with one key difference, instead of being stuck on a horizontal plane, in CR, you can also move up and down. This becomes essential to avoid the spiders that soon infiltrate and attack from all sides.
There’s not a whole lot I can say about Centipede: Recharged. It’s a fairly bare-bones reimagining that doesn’t add much to the original’s simple premise of topping the leaderboards by surviving for as long as you can.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, you just shouldn’t go in expecting anything mind-blowing.
In each game, you’re given a safe zone in which your sprite can move anywhere. This is useful because as the centipedes move from the top of the screen they can infiltrate your zone and they will need to be avoided. However, centipedes aren’t your only concern in your safe zone, enter the scorpions, these creatures move horizontally across the screen and are just as dangerous as their real-life counterparts.
The real fun begins when the spiders show up (not a phrase I ever thought I’d say as an arachnophobe). Killing the spiders drops power-ups that give a temporary boost to your shooter, from multi streams to rapid-fire. These can be a saving grace in your fight against the centipedes, they got me out of a tough spot more than once.
Centipede: Recharged also features couch co-op so you can grab a friend and work together to survive the fight. I would recommend playing co-op in docked mode, as it is hard to make out who is who in tabletop mode, especially when the action on-screen gets more hectic.
Each time you start a game, you will notice there are lots of mushrooms dotted everywhere. These act as blockers for your shots and continuously regenerate throughout the game. Luckily, they can be broken but take a few hits to do so. Later on, these can be a major source of frustration, especially when things get hectic and you’re trying to kill five centipedes at once, but all you’re hitting is shrooms.
Overall, Centipede: Recharged is a fun game for maybe an hour or two. If you’re looking to relive the glory days of arcade gaming, then it is a great choice, but if it’s a challenge you’re after, you might want to look elsewhere. I would still recommend Centipede: Recharged, especially if you’re competitive, or if you remember the original, for the nostalgia factor, if nothing else.