Caverns of Mars: Recharged

We’re three months into 2023, which is more than enough time for Atari to have sobered up from their 50th birthday celebration. Having just released an updated version of Akka Arrh from Llamasoft, many wondered what the future would hold for the Recharged series. And now we know, thanks to the release of Caverns of Mars: Recharged, an update of a 42-year-old shooter that wowed critics when it was first released on Atari’s home computers. Will this be another throwback shoot ‘em up that the critics can’t stop raving about or will it get lost in those dark and dangerous Martian tunnels? Find out now when I review Caverns of Mars: Recharged.

Originally released in 1981 on the Atari 8-bit family of home computers, Caverns of Mars was a vertically-scrolling shoot ‘em up developed by Greg Christensen when he was still a senior in high school. Where most shooters of the era were either contained to a single screen or side-scrolling back and forth, this one saw your little spaceship dodging both enemies and rocks as it descended deep within those otherworldly tunnels. It was a fun little shooter that played well on home computers and received strong marks from the critics.

Now, 42 years after it first came out, Caverns of Mars is back. This Recharged version takes the original premise and runs with it, enhancing the simple gameplay in some important ways. The concept is still the same – you fly a small ship down through a series of vertically-scrolling tunnels, all while picking up power-ups, shooting down aliens and being mindful of your fuel gauge. The big update here is that these Martian caverns are now destructible, allowing the little ship to shoot its way through the rocky terrain.

There are other changes, of course. The ship in the original version of the game could fly pretty much anywhere, while the one here is locked to a single spot, only able to move left and right. You’ll also find that shooting your weapon in this Recharged version will slow the ship down, which can be incredibly helpful for dodging both enemies and the rock formations. This is an interesting choice that not only sets the new version apart from the original game, but also most shooters in general.

Beyond the gameplay tweaks, the arcade mode also adds an extra layer of random fun to the action. Now, whenever you successfully survive a trip through the caverns, you’ll be given the choice between three different modifiers. This can include the ability to enhance your life, add more fuel gauges, a protective bubble or even equip a magnet that pulls the fuel towards your ship. These will begin the stack up over time, making each run feel somewhat different. And what’s fun about all this is that the longer you go, the more you’ll realize that sometimes your choices will work against you, making some of the later levels even harder or challenging in a unique way.

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Much like other recent games in the Recharged series, Caverns of Mars adds a few optional wrinkles to the arcade mode that can help boost your score. For example, you can play where your ship only has one life or where there are no upgrades and weapons. Those are a fun challenge, but I had such a good time with the standard mode that I doubt I’ll modify the game like that any time soon.

If you’ve been following my Recharged reviews over the last few years, then you will have heard me talk about how the bonus challenge missions are always the real reason to play one of these games. That is not the case with Caverns of Mars. For the first time, the mission mode feels like a big step backwards. It’s not like past iterations where they’ll give you a score to hit or a weird obstacle to overcome, because the goal of every Caverns of Mars mission is to simply survive to the end of the stage. That’s it. The developers didn’t even bother writing descriptions of the mission, a staple of the Recharged series.

If you look closely, you can still see elements of the great challenge modes from past games. You can tell that some of the missions are built around using a specific weapon, while others will pit you up against one type of enemy or obstacle. It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of these stages are genuinely challenging, much more so than what you get in the standard arcade mode. That’s something I like about the challenge missions, as it ups the difficulty for expert players. I just wish that there was more variety to the missions and that the developers did more with this mode. It would be cool to see these missions completely shake up the formula, much like you saw in Centipede, Black Widow and Breakout. It’s still a worthwhile addition, but mission mode is a big step backwards.

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This is a big reversal for me, somebody who would quickly get bored of the arcade modes and almost exclusively haunt the challenge missions. For the first time in any of these Recharged games, I found that I had a lot more fun trying to earn a high score in the arcade mode. There’s something about unlocking the modifiers, picking up power-ups and seeing the different level designs that kept me engaged. That’s a fun gameplay loop that adds a layer of depth that we don’t normally see in these Recharged games. It actually feels like somebody really thought about how to improve on Caverns of Mars while still honoring the spirit of the original. In that sense, they nailed it.

Visually, this game has a lot in common with the other Recharged games, in both good ways and bad. While I like that the updated graphics still have a retro look, I wish there was more variety to both the caverns and backgrounds. That has been a reoccurring complaint across this entire series of old school updates. This is a shooter with so many random elements, so it’s disappointing that it always looks the same every time you start it up. Randomized backgrounds and more visual options would have gone a long way to give this update more of a personality. Of course, I’ve been banging that drum for a few years now, so this is nothing new.

While some things never change, I was delighted to see that the action in Caverns of Mars feels completely different from what we’re used to from the Recharged series. By shifting away from single-screen shooters, the developer has been able to update the formula in some significant ways, leading to an all-around better game that has more depth than Missile Command, Asteroids and most other Atari upgrades. Caverns of Mars is one of the better Recharged games.