[Review] Asteroids: Recharged - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Adamvision, SneakyBox
Published By: Atari
Composed By: Megan McDuffee
Categories: Arcade, Retro, Shooter
Release Date: 12.14.21

It’s Asteroids, but pretty! Well, that’s an accurate description, but only to an extent. The latest in the Recharged line by Atari did something. It got a person previously ambivalent to the Asteroids IP into someone who couldn’t put the game down.

The original Asteroids is a vector based game. Black backgrounds, the shapes that jump out. The gameplay, real simple. You shoot those titular objects, they split into smaller rocks, repeat. It’s an arcade game from 1979, there’s not really a whole lot to it outside of being fun. They all were like that. Recharged feels much like a modern, yet not *too* modern version like what you’d see in the 2000’s. So lets discuss what this game brings to the table.

Lordy this game is colorful, my first thought was Geometry Wars. This is a good thing. Not that the original was ugly, it wasn’t. I like the vector based graphics, but Recharged is quite the looker. The colors make for much more eyecatching graphics, and if you ask me, having enemies, asteroids, your ship, explosions, etc… all be color coded is a very much welcome addition. You’ll also notice the fantastic music by Megan McDuffee. Upon listening to her entire Atari Recharged album, it gave me a some great Simon Viklund vibes, like what he did for Bionic Commando: ReArmed. Wonderful stuff. I’d definitely recommend going to Megan’s Bandcamp and supporting her.

So enough of the immediate, less gameplay focused stuff. Lets talk about the new gameplay improvements. Power ups! Simple addition, but I quite like the powerups. Exploding shots, black holes, shields, mirror shots! It spices up the game just enough to keep me invested.

The big showcase for Asteroids: Recharged is the challenge mode. As the name implies, you get a set of challenges. Bite sized stages to test your skills. I found this more to be a good tutorial, familiarizing you with the powerups and different scenarios. Most of these were easy enough, but a handful really got me tensed up and were quite the challenge.

Seeing as this is a modern game, you get all of the online leaderboards and the like. The arcade roots of high scores never go away.