Thanks to Atari for the review codel

Title: Berzerk: Recharged
System: Steam
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 11/09/2023

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Story

In this game, you must survive the labyrinth and escape the wrath of Evil Otto! Who is he? Who knows! But Stern’s classic arcade hit manages to make a surprise comeback, due to Atari buying some of their Arcade IP, and Berzerk being picked to join the pretty stellar lineup of Recharged games. Does this non-Atari title fit in snugly with the other efforts we’ve seen so far?

Presentation

The original Berzerk was a game from the early 80s, and was rather primative. No music, very simple sound effects, and quite a lot of sampled speech. In a strange turn of events, this simplicity led to a rather creepy experience!

Berzerk Recharged manages to do an OK job at bringing that simple look to the neon style of the Recharged brand, and you can still tell what every character is meant to be. The colors are very nice on the eyes and the enemies even change palette every few rooms as they get tougher and tougher. Evil Otto is a bit goofier looking than he was before, and the music and bright colors completely remove any possibility of the original spooky vibe, but visually Berzerk Recharged looks in line with the other Recharged titles, so at least it’s consistent there even if it doesn’t feel that consistent with the original game.

Speaking of inconsistency, the sound design is just all over the place. Granted, like most games Recharged titles have used as a base, the original game had no music to speak of, so Berzerk Recharged brings another techno soundtrack to support the action here, and I found the themes to be pretty OK. Better than some prior Recharged games, but still not memorable in the slightest.

However the sound effects is where everything gets really messed up, since the original game relied heavily on booming voice samples to bring a sense of tension, along with the sound effect of your weapon packing quite a punch. Here we have the same shot sound heard in other recharged games, and while this felt fine in something like Centipede, for a more frantic game like Berzerk it really lacks oomph.

Yet when it comes to the voice samples, there are indeed new ones in Recharged, though you’ll be lucky if you can even make out any with how terrible the voice mixing is, being mixed in the same channel as the sound effects, and being way, way quieter than the SE. So even if you mute the music and crank the SE volume all the way up, your weapon will still drown out the few vocal taunts that Otto and co will spit out, and if you do manage to hear them, they’ll fail to impress, for they hardly sound threatening in the slightest. Considering the original game was pretty notable for its speech sampling, having this reimagining completely botch the voices was immensely disappointing.

Gameplay

Berzerk tasks you with going through a sprawling maze, using both sticks and the shoulder buttons to dash, shoot, and aim your way toward defeating any sentry robots or foes in your path! But if you stay around in a room for too long, then Evil Otto will barge in, bouncing his way towards you and instant death. The twin stick controls are very easy to grasp, although I do wish the right stick just fired automatically rather than require a button press.

The main goal of the original game was just to survive, score points and make your way deeper in an endless maze, and Recharged tries to bring this formula over to mixed results. The good news is just like recent Recharged games you still have multipliers to toggle that makes the game a lot tougher with the benefit of more points, and these disable powerups, dashing and the health bar to make it more in line with the OHKO experience of the original game. They also added a chaining system of sorts, where defeating enemies in a short timeframe will increase the multiplier up to 5X, granting you more points the longer you keep your chain going, so if you manage to cut corners just right, you can rack up tons of points!

All of this would make for great scorechaing potential, but Berzerk Recharged suffers from utterly baffling design choices that make the experience a lot more frustrating than it should be. The biggest problem as of now are the bugs that I’ve run into many times during my runs, with one of the biggest ones being a bug that takes place if you enter a room with a diagonal angle or a dash, causing your character to shoot off into the next room during the screen transition before snapping back to the entrance. If your character decides to take a hike during this and runs straight into an enemy during the transition, then you can easily lose a good scorechaser run through no fault of your own, which is just beyond infuriating and blows my mind as to how they didn’t catch this ahead of time.

Other bugs are pretty irritating too, with another big one being just how jarring death transitions are. Sometimes I’ll see the proper death animation for the player character kick in, but most of the time the game will make a sharp jump cut to the Game Over screen the minute I come in contact with a projectile. If I’m in the middle of a lengthy run and graze a stray bullet, I could easily end up staring at a Game Over screen with no warning whatsoever! It just feels very jarring, and I’m kinda surprised at the inconsistency with this aspect.

Another disappointing aspect comes from Evil Otto, and while I’ve hardly played the original game, even the little time I spent with it shows that he’s meant to be a “get the heck out of this room NOW” kind of invincible foe, and here in recharged he starts off very, very slow. He’s barely a threat at all until later rooms in a run, where the enemies start to upgrade and get more aggressive, including Otto himself. Your player character having pretty good speed and play control is also a contributor to this, and while Otto will still OHKO you even with a full health bar, I hardly found him to be menancing in the slightest. It doesn’t help that he’s barely audible, too.

Thankfully, Recharged staples Mission Mode and Local Co-Op provide an extra layer to this game, and the missions in Berzerk are actually pretty great! They still suffer from the same annoying bugs I mentioned earlier, but the core gameplay is a bit better since each mission has fixed, hand-designed layouts to navigate, with the goal of these levels being to fully clear out each of the rooms. Since you have to focus on a full clear, and several of these levels end up getting rather maze-like, the tension is much higher here, and I even had moments where Evil Otto actually felt like the threat he was hyped up to me as I tried my best to hunt down that last enemy in a room with one exit. Definitely the highlight of the game and the part where the new powerups really come into handy and get time to shine, too.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Berzerk Recharged is a rare misstep in the Recharged lineup. As much as I was hopeful Berzerk would make for a great entry, so much of this reimagining is bogged down by unfortunate bugs and a lack of polish. In some aspects like the excellent mission mode, there’s still tons of fun to be had! But weird sound mixing, buggy gameplay, strange jump-cuts, and an overall lack of energy for what was one of the strongest Arcade games of the early 80s leads to a disappointing reimagining.

Still, Mission Mode is the true highlight, and I really hope some patches drop to help polish this one up to make the core loop more exciting, since there’s still potential for a really good time if Mission Mode is any indicator, and the smooth controls still lead to a game that feels decently fun to play; as long as a room transition doesn’t kill you.

I give Berzerk Recharged a 6 out of 10,