Akka Arrh Review (Parallax Abstraction)
I am a huge fan of Jeff Minter's games going back to the Commodore 64 and have followed his stuff since then. So when I say that this might be my favourite game of his, I wanted it to be in context.
Akka Arrh was originally an Atari arcade game that never left the prototype stage and wasn't officially released, though there are versions you can play now, including in the Atari 50 collection. It's a very hard game to explain as there's never really been anything like it before or since. The simplest version is that it's a 360 degree shooter where you're essentially a turret in the middle of the screen and trying to keep enemies away from said turret. If they touch it, they'll go underneath it and try to steal your pods. You can then drop down into the turret and try to take out the enemies that got in before they can steal them. If you run out of pods, it's game over, but you can gets pods back by achieving certain goals.
You can launch bombs which reset your score combo, but create shockwaves within certain areas of each level that will kill most enemies that touch them, which will also create their own shockwaves. For each enemy killed by a shockwave, you get a bullet for your secondary gun, which fires much more quickly and doesn't reset your combo. You ultimately want to be able to use this as much as possible to score the highest in general and also to unlock extra bonuses. There are also various power-ups that will spawn and give you extra temporary abilities or just points bonuses.
Even all that explanation doesn't convey what it's like to play this. You should watch it in motion to get a real idea of it. As usual, this has Jeff Minter's acid trip type visuals, which are understandably polarizing. I like them, but I don't blame anyone who thinks they're too much.
You can play this with a controller, but that adds an extra layer of difficulty in my opinion and the game really benefits from the dexterity that a mouse provides. Like many Jeff Minter games, there's a unique mechanic where you can not only start a new game from the last level you completed, but you can also start with a certain score, which you can increase the delta for by replaying older levels and doing better at them. It's a really smart and clever system where unlike traditional arcade games, it doesn't force you to start from scratch with every new game, nor does it make you start at a later level, but with no score, meaning you couldn't be competitive without starting over anyway. It's a different kind of accessibility feature that you don't see in basically any other games of this type.
As I said, you really should see this in motion to understand just how cool and different an experience it is. Unfortunately, like many releases from "New Atari", I think they're priced this way too high and it hasn't gotten the exposure it deserves as a result. As a huge Jeff Minter fan, I don't mind paying full price for it, but I do think most would probably be best to wait for a sale. But if you like arcade style experience and different ones, don't miss this!