Black Widow: Recharged

While it would have been nice to see Centipeded: Recharged's leaderboard and score-reporting issues addressed in Black Widow: Recharged, the twin-stick shooting action provides a great quick-hit arcade rush.

Black Widow: Recharged follows the primer of the trio revitalized by Atari, both in terms of quality and defects. Game repetitiveness is unavoidable even playing in pairs, and this is enhanced with the duplicated challenges. However, it is also necessary to point out that it has the best gameplay of the three, thanks to the use of analogue sticks, which makes it stand out from the rest.

Black Widow Recharged has too high a price, too little going for it, and too many bugs (the last of which is at least somewhat appropriate, I guess).

Black Widow: Recharged is another winner from the Atari Recharged series. It doesn’t matter if you got to enjoy the original or are coming into this for the very first time. This is a highly entertaining pick up and play arcade game with gameplay that still holds up years later. Brilliant, to the point gameplay that’s ideal to enjoy when you only have a few minutes here and there. Or when you just need a breather from more heavy titles. Let’s also appreciate that for a moment you get to play as the spider in the lead role of a game. But whether you see this spider as a hero or villain I guess is up to you.

Black Widow has been around since the origins of twin-stick shooting and this Recharged iteration does a decent job of modernizing the arcade classic but it could have done more to make it hold its own among its genre contemporaries. Insert obligatory spider pun here.

As someone who, oddly, never actually played Black Widow back in the day, I want to be up front that unlike many classic arcade refreshes in this case I have no potential for rose-colored feelings over this redux...

If you’ve played any other Atari Recharged title, you know what to expect from Black Widow: Recharged. It’s more of the same, but prettier and on-the-go. The thing is that we live in an era where we get half a dozen twin-stick shooters a week, so name recognition alone isn’t enough to make Black Widow: Recharged stand out from the crowd.