All in all, Missile Command: Recharged is a good game. It doesn’t mess with the gameplay design that the original established, but it does give you options and reasons to keep playing it.
What in the world are you doing, Atari and Nickervision Studios? You can’t just take a classic, bring it back on the Nintendo Switch, and call it a day. Right? RIGHT? Well, they did. And, damn…it’s good.
Missile Command: Recharged is set up on the surface like the original Missile Command in the arcades. There are three main guns (left/right/middle), the player has cities to protect with the guns, and the guns have to shoot missiles out of the sky before they destroy said cities or guns. It’s just that simple on the surface. And, yes, there is chaos everywhere, which was the point of the first Missile Command, as well as its panicky charm. The game was built for the player to eventually lose, which is okay, as that is the arcade mantra in the 80s, but the recharged version of Missile Command makes that inevitable frustration less intensive with some new, yet simple innovations.
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I remember when Missile Command took arcade center stage in 1980. The game had a cue ball for a controller, players moved a target around on-screen with it, and tried to shoot down dozens of nuclear missiles before they reached their destructive destinations. It was a difficult game back in the day and also played off the fears of every American that the USSR would some day take us out with missiles and there was little we could do about it (Reagan scared the shit out of a lot of us during this time period, so we were all convinced our end was inevitable). The urgency to defend your homeland was real in the game, and the fear of it happening in real life was doubly real. Emotionally, this is one of the first intense games in the gaming industry. Yay, the 80s.
All of that history behind us, Atari and Nickervision Studios has brought back that same classic, has somehow maintained that urgency that it contained in the arcade, and has added a few features to make you want to replay it. The features added? So simple in concept, yet so effective when it comes to injecting replay-ability — they included upgrades to your guns and homesteads. Essentially, you use the score you obtain from shooting missiles from the sky as currency to upgrade your shot speed, effectiveness, rebuilding time for destroyed guns, and blast radius. The upgrades come in ‘2x’ scores. This means that your first set of upgrades starts at 2500 points across the board. Your next set doubles to 5000 points. Then your next step doubles to 10000 points. The difficulty arc with upgrades is sharp, grind-y, but certainly warranted as you can see the difference these upgrades make immediately with your first one. The points are difficult to come by, but the need for upgrades/points makes the replay of the game a necessity, but in a good way. People might scoff at this, but if there was a way to institute these back in the early 80s, the game would have had triple the quarters (rough guesstimate) that it did, and it was successful back in the day without them. The upgrades are so darn simple, but effective when it comes to taming one’s frustration with the game, then charging one to go through the game again and improve. Wash, rinse, repeat.
While most reviewers who probably picked this up weren’t there back in 1980 to experience this game for the first time, or in the era that it was in, the incredibly simple concept of upgrades make this game that much better. They might discount this as a gimmick to re-sell a simple game, but it’s not a gimmick — it actually improves the gameplay without changing it. Most developers that take control of a classic title and ‘remaster’ it tend to want to change the core of it that makes it classic. Nickervision didn’t do this, and bravo to them. It’s like buying an old car and changing how it works, but not really touching the insides or what made it special.
The gameplay beyond the upgrades is what you would expect from the original classic, though there is a simple change to that as well.
The first change is on the enemy side. As bombs are dropping out of the sky, and you’re trying to blow them up before they reach their destination, the new game changes what is being dropped. The enemy bomb sizes come in large cluster bombs that are circular, as well as large/medium/small bombs. Each type of bomb has its own speed of decent, which makes it tricky/challenging to get them all. There is also a transport that carries a four-pack of medium bombs that drop at mid-screen-level. You can destroy any of these items above with a single defensive shot. The chaos comes in that they’re dropping everywhere, they are coming down at different speeds and having to accept the fact that you won’t be able to hit everything, which is part of the design in the original game.
As all the above chaos is happening, the game does have a floating power-up that travels through the sky every 15-20 seconds. The power-ups could equal out to better shields on your cities, bigger blast radius, faster shooting (super fast), or destroying all the bombs on the screen. The power-ups cycle through as it moves across the map, which means you can wait for it to get to your favorite power-up before shooting it to activate it.
Again, none of this bothers the original groundwork for the classic game from 1980, it only seems to improve upon it. The addition of Leaderboards also helps to motivate you to try-try again. The more healthy motivation to get you to keep playing the game, the better the game is, especially when it meets your expectations going into it. This still feels like the classic version of Missile Command, but with a respectable makeover.
Now, how does this game do on the Switch? It does just fine. The joy con movement is spot on, though using a pro controller is fine as well. The neat thing about the Switch, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, is that you can touch the screen and fire off anti-missile missiles as well. I can only assume that on the backend the screen is divided into thirds, so touching the middle or left/right activates the appropriate gun, which is brilliant. Am I confident enough to use this method over the controls? Lord, no. Is it a good option? It can be with practice.
All in all, Missile Command: Recharged is a good game. It doesn’t mess with the gameplay design that the original established, but it does give you options and reasons to keep playing it.
