"Yours not to reason why, yours just to dodge and shoot!"

River Raid is surely one of the tidiest Atari titles out there. With relatively simple icons and only five different enemies, your object is to shoot as many enemies as you can with your plane as you scroll up a river. Although enemies can only ram you, you must also watch your fuel gauge(hint: E does not mean enough!) and be sure not to stray on to land. Although there are no fixed levels, checkpoints are supplied at each bridge; you can crash into it to approach the next section, but if you are killed before that, you are sent to the beginning. The more bridges you kill, the narrower the river passages get on average, the more they may branch out, and the less chance you'll have to re-gain fuel. There's no end to the game but Activision offered a generic reward for people scoring over a surprisingly reasonable point total.

Your plane is relatively easy to control, although missiles are another matter. You can slow down the scrolling by pushing down, which is especially useful when over a fuel tank--this helps you recharge more. Conversely going quickly may be useful to avoid oncoming enemies who seem to be on a collision course with you, or more importantly you may be low on fuel(fuel use depends solely on time) and need to rush forward to find it quickly, or maybe with some fancy flying you can pick up fuel close to tight curve in the river. Diagonal movement gets necessary for survival as the river starts moving sharply. There will probably be a few problems judging where the edge of the river is at first, resulting in a few lost planes, but you can sharply control the scrolling. I also don't totally agree with how the game makes you fire; moving your plane steers your missile.

The five objects you can shoot are jet planes, helicopters, boats, fuel tanks and bridges, and although none of them can shoot back, they are still dangerous. Planes and helicopters head one way and wrap across the screen while boats bounce back and forth in the water, the only difference being that the helicopters have cool twirling propellers while planes are a bit faster. These two opponents also start out stationary, and you have to develop a strategy for avoiding or killing them no matter when they might start moving. Fuel tanks allow you to regain fuel, and you can even shoot them right before you pass over. It's a lot of fun to use the enemy's resources and still leave a mess behind. Bridges are generally motionless but will often appear after a nasty bend in the river.

The graphics and sound work well, too. Your plane tilts when moving sideways, and the houses on the edge add some sort of scenery although maybe trees and bushes or military material(tanks are always cool) would have worked better. But every object contrasts well with the river--white and red striped fuel tanks labeled FUEL, leaving your process-of-elimination skills for puzzler games, or your yellow plane(ironic that the ''sissiest'' colored object is the only one that can shoot) or black helicopters and jets. Bridges and boats do rather well for the usual stripy Atari object graphics, and the only disconcerting part is that objects that scroll off the screen are tough to judge as they seem to show up well inside the boundaries on the other side--without the planes and jets doing this, though, the game would be too easy, so overall this is quite acceptable. The sound alerts you when you are low on or recharging fuel(the adjusts depending on how much fuel you have, too: low, high or full,) and you get a shaking noise and fireworks whenever you blow up a bridge. It's above utilitarian, which for Atari is just fine.

River Raid is more sophisticated than the old standbys Asteroids and Space Invaders, derived from video games, and it manages to capture a general appeal while not being a direct spin-off of any one game. What I like about how the levels change is that the bad guys don't simply just get faster until they're impossible or plateau(a simple choice of two evils so many early games seemed to face.) You get new passages and river corridors and diagrams, usually with sharper curves. The difference is harder to quantify, and you must be on guard against more than just missiles. Now River Raid seems to have three silly flaws; you're bombing in a civilian area(houses to the side of the river,) it's a bit arbitrary that your plane crashes if it goes off the side, and, well, having this sort of war in a river is just odd. But its fun value as a combination dodging and shooting game is indisputable. And how much of a reason do you need to shoot stuff, anyway?

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/29/02, Updated 01/29/02