Akka Arrh

Chaos is actually choreography, as an unreleased Atari arcade game gets the full Minter treatment.

Akka Arrh is an interesting experiment. Despite its shortcomings, Atari fans can still find some fun in this blaster from the past – the game just comes with a big asterisk. As much as I’m excited to see a lost piece of gaming history revitalized and brought to modern consoles, overwhelming visuals and confusing, abstract game mechanics bring the experience down.

The core loop is a simple one, but it’s not as instantly addictive as many of the other games from Atari's prime. While it’s satisfying to pull off a huge combo, and requires a surprising degree of strategy, by the time you’ve played through the core 50 levels of the game, you won’t be as anxious to dive back in as you might hope.

As irreverent and disruptive as one has come to expect from the mind of Jeff Minter, Akka Arrh is a game that, rather than based around all-out cattle space warfare, requires a certain level of restraint to wring the most from its scoring potential. Learning to dally with its diverse and ever-changing threats is almost mathematical, but still liberating and rewarding to overcome. It may struggle to appeal in the long-term in the same way as Tempest or his recent Polybius, owing to its slightly less absorbing construction; and those uninitiated in Minter's unusual thought processes may find it altogether abstruse. Nevertheless, it certainly earns a rightful place in his catalogue of psychedelic, slightly barmy, and altogether addictive score-based challenges.

Once the controls are sorted out, Akka Arrh reveals itself as an absolutely fantastic shooter that plays like nothing else out there.

To that end, I wholeheartedly recommend Akka Arrh for those on the fence about VR. Or perhaps those wanting a laid-back arcade experience that incorporates VR in ways that most of us can handle without being overwhelmed. It’s a simple arcade game that doesn’t require much effort to learn, but is worth the psychedelic trip to master and replay over and over again.

Akka Arrh is a relic from a lost time, making itself quite at home with a modern player through overwhelming visuals and a gameplay loop that seeps into your gray matter.

Akka Arrh is simple enough in its objectives, but there's plenty of enjoyment and skill involved in placing bombs and firing at enemies.

Akka Arrh is a near-sensory psychedelic experience, offering challenging, non-stop action that appropriates precise but hard-to-master mechanics. There's a purposefully confusing look, with touches of modernity supporting an idea misunderstood decades ago.

The game has been out for other platforms for a while, but gets a PSVR2 option for the Playstation 5 version and this makes a bigger difference than you might originally think. While the 2D version is a lot more difficult to understand and keep an overview, the PSVR2 option makes the game a lot clearer. You are in the middle of your tower and with the two layers you have a lot of depth in the different levels. It doesn't happen often, but this is a game that is really much better in VR. This is a game for Atari and Minter fans and players who are interested in the history of this game. It's great to discover old prototypes and make them accessible to many people. You will quickly notice why this game remained a prototype and did not reach the arcades in the eighties.