There’s a lot to be said for the simple things in life. Take, for example, hot buttered toast – possibly the easiest thing you can knock up in your kitchen but utterly delicious, the food of the gods. Simple can also work when it comes to games, in fact smiple had to workback in the 1980s, when your standard arcade cabinet had less memory than a particularly forgetful goldfish and all the processing power of a mildly surprised lettuce.
Berzerk Recharged is a throwback to times when you didn’t need a backstory, crafting or card-based abilities wedged in to games for no reason. It’s incredibly simple and, apart from a few modern enhancements, Recharged is the same game that was released in arcades in 1980s. Developer Sneakybox hasn’t added any superfluous costume DLC or a battle pass, they’ve just tweaked the classic formula enough to make it compelling for modern audiences.
Berzerk Recharged is a 360 degree twin stick shooter (an upgrade from the original’s 8 directional shooting) in which an unnamed space hero has to fight his way throw a maze filled with robots. A grand total of four enemy designs can be found in the game: Mines that gravitate towards you when you near them, robots that run towards you and shoot, laser turrets that shoot in your direction, and Evil Otto. Otto is a large bouncing smiley face who enters a room after a certain time period and will chase you until he touches you and you die.
In summary: Things run towards you without any hint of AI and try to kill you, while you must shoot them and kill them first. Blast enough of them away and move on enough levels and the enemies change colour and get more health. Shoot enough of those enemies, and they change colour again and, well you get the idea.
The combat is where Sneakybox has added a few modern touches with power ups granting our hero bounce shots, rail guns, and shotguns, as well as power ups for speed and health, and a dash button. Most of these work really well, but the rail gun is hard to aim, a laser sight to indicate where it will fire would have really helped. As usual with these rebooted arcade classics, Berzerk Recharged features an arcade mode as well as a Challenge Mode, online leaderboards and the option to add some modifiers to you run which then give you a score multiplier. It’s also got a two player local co-op mode, just like the original arcade title.
Run, shoot, score, repeat. Back in the 80s the biggest games followed that formula and that simplicity has been largely been lost in modern gaming so to find a title that is that simple– and I mean that as a compliment – is really quite refreshing. Anyone can pick up the game and learn the mechanics in 30 seconds, but later levels are really going to challenge hardcore arcade fans.
