ASTROSMASH might sound like ill-advised nookie on a five-a-side football pitch, but it’s less X-rated than that. Instead, it’s a mash-up of Asteroids and Space Invaders, as if someone got their memories mixed up between the two.
ASTROSMASH is a game that we were certain we had played before. It’s so similar in concept to Shootvaders the Beginning, that we went back to our review as a kind of double-take to see if it was made by the same people. But no, this bears no relation to that game.
Having done a little more research, that sense of deja vu comes from a different source. This comment is going to age us faster than doing the robot to Duran Duran, but ASTROSMASH was originally released on the Intellivision console forty years ago. Apparently it’s one of the top-five best-sellers for the console, and I played it in the cobwebbed past. Everything became clear. ASTROSMASH is an anniversary edition of the original game.
There are two major differences to the original ASTROSMASH. The first is that the vision is fixed, squarely, at local multiplayer. Start any of the game’s three modes, and you will be confronted by a multiplayer lobby. ASTROSMASH dearly wants you to play with more than one player, and you and three players can play simultaneously. The more players, the more frantic ASTROSMASH becomes.
The second is that there has been a significant visual glow up. We were never going to get a pixel-by-pixel rebuild of the Intellivision classic, but you might be surprised by just how good ASTROSMASH looks. The ships are generic, but the asteroids (and other space phenomena) are beautifully realised. It’s quite the challenge to make space rocks look dazzling, but ASTROSMASH manages it. This knocks Shootvaders the Beginning into a cocked hat in terms of ravishing good looks.
As you might expect from an arcade throwback like this, the concept is big and dumb. ASTROSMASH locks you to the bottom of the game screen, sliding back and forth like a true Space Invaders ship. You can burst in a direction with a tap of the X button, but it doesn’t stop you from feeling a little vulnerable.
From the top of the screen, various death traps start tumbling down. The opening levels opt for traditional asteroids and meteorites. They come in various sizes and forms, with big ones that shatter into smaller ones, bouncing rocks, and others that move diagonally, as if caught in a hurricane. It’s hard enough to keep them at bay with the simple repeating laser that you get as standard.
Luckily, power-ups start dropping which make clearing the screen a little easier. A mushroom cloud clears the screen, while multi-lasers improve your attack capabilities. Shields, extra lives and a few others add to the roster. It’s not a hugely wide-ranging list, and they are mostly simple temporary upgrades that you will have seen elsewhere, but they add a little risk-reward to proceedings, as they often appear where the enemies are densest.
There are ten levels here, and you’re playing them in sequence to see if you can get further than last time. The developers and artists clearly got bored of modeling asteroids, so they started to swap them out for torpedoes, UFOs, bombs and the like in the latter levels. There’s a spot of baptism-of-fire to any new level: there are very specific rules about how the new enemies and obstacles behave, and you’re likely to die at least once before you find them out. It can feel a little harsh to die just as you reach somewhere new, but that’s the nature of arcade blasters.
We soon found ourselves in a rhythm: you need to wait for UFOs to fire once and then move in to kill them. The torpedoes surrounded by a ring of rocks will go down quicker if you wait for a gap in the ring. This is most definitely a shooter where knowledge accumulates, and you get better with each playthrough. Considering the age of ASTROSMASH, it’s impressive how inventive these hazards become.
ASTROSMASH’s downfall is its age. By being a respectful remaster of the original, it neglects to add in the reasons to replay that we take for granted from modern shooters. There are no upgrades or unlocks, no highscores, nor is there a roguelike structure that might have tempted us to play one more time. The reason to play multiple times is for the multiplayer, or to reach a point that’s further than your personal best. The only motivations are ephemeral: there’s no real reward for progressing.
That simplicity is an emblem of when it was made. We can understand why developers BBG Entertainment didn’t include any meta-stuff like the ones we’ve mentioned. By leaving them out, they maintain the purity of this remake. But the result is that, while we enjoyed zapping asteroids and aliens, we never wanted to for more than an hour or so. There’s a meagre-ness to ASTROSMASH that can’t quite be bolstered by a few game modes that let you play the same levels in a differing order.
That’s not to diminish the craft that has gone into making this slick remake. There are certainly plenty of options, including autofire and hyperspace options, which randomises your starting placement, as well as difficulty toggles. And can we mention the lavish and gorgeous graphics one more time? But unless you’re a long-time enthusiast, we’re not sure that the depth of options and art assets will make up for over-simplicity.
Know the beast that you’re getting: ASTROSMASH is a coin-op classic that’s been given a razzle-dazzle visual improvement, four-player co-op, as well as reams of graphical and gameplay options. What it isn’t is a modern shmup with all of the depth and game modes that you might come to expect from the genre. Know these rules of engagement, and ASTROSMASH might surprise you.
