Missile Command: Recharged

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the physical-only Atari Recharged Collection 4, along with Gravitar: Recharged. It is also included in the physical-only Atari Recharged Collection 3 + 4 Dual Pack Edition bundle, along with Gravitar: Recharged, Caverns of Mars: Recharged and Yars: Recharged. It is also included in Atari Recharged: Volume Two, along with all of the above named games plus Berzerk: Recharged.)

Missile Command: Recharged is a reimagining of the 1980 arcade classic, with this newer game releasing on multiple platforms in 2020. This game takes the Arcade-style gameplay of the original and brings a faster pacing, as well as some minor Roguelike elements. I previously reviewed this game, and while my feelings about the game haven’t changed, something else has – the price was raised from a tempting $3 to a far less appealing $10. As such, I am revisiting this review to reflect the change in price.

As seems to be customary for reboots of Atari-era franchises, this release gives the game a neon-infused presentation that looks slick and modern while still feeling appropriately old-school. The 2D visuals here look a bit too repetitive, but otherwise they’re pretty visually-striking. These visuals are backed by a techno-esque theme that’s pretty catchy and works wonderfully for this game.

As for the gameplay, the core of this game remains largely intact – you’re aiming rockets at sections of the sky to defend against incoming bombs, trying to time your volley so the explosions cover the area the bombs will be in when the missile arrives. Getting this timing down can be a bit tricky, especially as your missiles are coming from three different posts. Meanwhile, you need to protect not only your posts, but the cities in between them – unlike in the original, your missile posts will automatically regenerate given enough time, but if you lose a city, it’s gone for good, and losing all of them ends the game.

However, unlike the original, this game starts fast and furious almost immediately, giving players very little time to adjust, and resulting in a massive early difficulty spike that the original game never had. You will feel overwhelmed within the first minute of playing this game, and you will die very quickly, over and over again.

Softening this sting somewhat is the ability to use points you’ve earned in-game to purchase permanent upgrades to increase your weapons’ power, their speed, or the regenerative abilities of downed outposts. Still, after an initial few upgrades, further upgrades become prohibitively costly, meaning that you’ll still feel extremely outgunned.

There is one element that helps with this somewhat – the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen is perfectly implemented here, allowing players to instantaneously target a point on the screen rather than having to move a cursor there. Needless to say, this is by far the preferred way to play this game. However, even with this edge, the game is still punishingly difficult.

Finally, we get to the entire point behind this re-review – the price change. At $3, I felt that this game was a pretty good buy, albeit a tad niche because of the game’s difficulty. However, with this game getting a bloated price over three times the original cost, it has become far more difficult to recommend. I can almost understand the desire to price this game so it falls in line with newer releases in the series, but when many game reviews (including my own) take a game’s price into consideration when making determinations, this looks like a sleazy way to get review scores higher than the game deserves.

It’s a shame, because I feel like Missile Command Recharged has a lot going for it. The presentation is fantastic, the ability to upgrade in-between rounds adds a wonderful new form of progression, and the core gameplay here is still engaging and relatively unique, even in today’s market. On the other hand, this game’s absurdly high difficulty level that spikes early and spikes hard is enough to really narrow the appeal of this game, and unless you’re an old-school aficionado, a masochist, or someone looking for a challenge, this game’s difficulty may make it hard to enjoy the game’s better features. And now, with a price tag multiple times what the game once was, it’s even more difficult to recommend this game to anyone.

tl;dr – Missile Command: Recharged is a reimagining of the classic ‘80s Arcade game where players blast away incoming bombs with missile strikes. The presentation here is great, the new progression mechanics are nice, and the great classic gameplay still works well today. However, the game’s ridiculously high difficulty spikes almost immediately, and the inflated price makes this game seem like far from a good value. There’s some fun to be had here for a select audience, but most players are better off skipping this.

Grade: C-

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