While a little before my time, there’s no doubt that an early gaming legend was born Jeff Minter – his psychedelic trips of games took the early high-score chase of the arcades and gave them some visual splendour. Tempest is the classic example, the top down action resplendent with flashy colours and a simple yet rewarding gameplay hook. It’s this that Akka Arrh feels most in tune with, a sort of alternate take that feels like a game lost in time.
Indeed, the game opens by informing us of the myth of Akka Arrh – a title rumoured to exist but rarely seen. The release then brings it to a wider audience, but can it’s mystical legend be worth revisiting?
That’ll depend on your preference for older-than-old-school gameplay. Like many of his works, playing Akka Arrh is simple enough, but getting the most out of it requires some serious patience.
The beginning levels teach us the mechanics one by one, and the premise is actually quite interesting. Played from a top down perspective, we must rotate a cursor around our central character and defend from incoming waves of enemies. The key twist here is that we can drop a bomb which emits a slowly expanding radius of damage. As this radius hits enemies, they too explode and emit their own expanding radius, which in turns hits other enemies, and so on.
Every time we drop a new bomb our score multiplier resets, so ideally we want to tactically drop a single bomb and ride the chain reaction through as much of the level as we can. Obviously, this is easier said than done. Later levels introduce multiple-levelled arenas that our bomb wont cover in one blast, while each level also has a different shape to both the layout and the damage radius. Initial simplicity transforms into hectic chaos and we ride the line between keeping the combo going and dropping a new defensive bomb. If you’re invested in the high-score chase style gameplay, it can lead to many tense moments as you wait just a few more seconds, hoping the enemies move into harms way.
We’ve also got a turret that we can fire which doesn’t upset the combo meter, though bullets for this are limited by how many enemies we kill with the blast radius. Some foes can only be killed with this and this causes them to emit their own blast radius, so combining our bombs and the enemies own demise is the key to high scoring rounds.
The final elements are power-ups that appear occasionally – such as an auto turret or power up of our current turret – and the need to protect our life orbs. These are located “downstairs” and intermittently need defending by interrupting our combo and heading down to kill the enemy ships.
Individually, these are enough to keep us busy, but once all start to converge on one level it’s easy to get over run. While the flashy (and we mean literally flashy) visuals were once a draw to the eye in the arcade, here they can get a bit much. We’re all for colour in games but the constant flashing and pulsing can get quite distracting, especially when there’s a lot going on. Add in the barrage of audio cues to signify different things and it became an experience we found to be a bit overwhelming at times. Certainly those who suffer with epilepsy would do well to steer clear, but even we found our head spinning a little after a short session.
Those who can stomach it though will find a surprisingly deep arcade title. The different methods of attack and the need to balance all out assault with holding fire at times can provide some great gameplay moments. And Minter is the king of the arcade thrill, that one more go feeling embues Akka Arrh as much as any of his and Llamasoft’s previous work.
Conclusion
A throwback to the early days of arcade gaming wrapped up in more modern presentation, Akka Arrh is a fun, albeit head-spinning, title.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
