GAME CLEAR No. 160 -- Berzerk: Recharged

Berzerk: Recharged (2023, Multiplatform)

Developer: Sneakybox
Publisher: Atari
Clear Version: PS5
Clear Date: 3/3/24

Fight like a robot

Atari’s focus on revitalizing their catalog continues apace with this latest release in their Recharged series. Like its predecessors, Berzerk: Recharged takes an old (albeit recently acquired by Atari SA) Atari game and gives it a modern remix and HD graphics. It’s extremely the kind of thing that came out regularly on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN when those services first launched. Appropriately, it’s priced similarly too.

And that’s why I can’t go too hard on ol’ Berzerk: Recharged. I find its art style a bit underwhelming and its twin-stick implementation of the original Berzerk concept to be a bit imperfect, but it’s still mostly structurally sound. You’ve got missions to complete alone or with a friend, or you can play the arcade mode solo or co-op as well. That’s it! And buddy, that’s a game. There’s no story, no loading screens, just a little top-down game where you run around an infinitely expansive, non-Euclidean facility clearing rooms of robots before moving on to the next.

It’s not amazing, but it takes up very little space on my PS5, so I imagine I’ll fire it up once in awhile over the years for a quick game. Oh, and it has easy achievements for people who care about that sort of thing.

Decent game. 👍