Astroblast

"What a waste of plastic"

Astroblast was one Hell of a horrible game, to say the least. It is kind of a hyped-up mix between Space Invaders and Missile Command. The object is to destroy a HUGE array of things crashing down on you. If one of the fifty billion pieces hits you, you loose a life. Also, if one of the ten billion white pieces touches the ground, you die. A little harsh isn't it? I think. This game has gotten a good five minutes of game play out of me, so I don't know the other main details of the game. Maybe I had it on the wrong difficulty, but either way, this game was pretty badly planned out.

My guess is it was made by some kids with way too much time on their hands trying to make a hit game. It went horribly wrong when they forgot that the person playing has to have at least a small chance of winning or even getting to the second stage.

Graphics were the only part on this game's side. The movement was very swift and animations were very good. With quick moving game play, the graphics asked for a lot, and for the most part, they got it down pretty good.

Five billion missiles crashing down on the earth also calls for a lot of sound innovation, too. Each missile has the same exact sound, and seriously with two or three coming on the screen at the same time all the time gets very annoying. The sounds were accurate though, I have to give it that. It almost sounded like a missile going through the air, better than most Atari 2600 games.

Yeah, sound and graphics were great, but everything else in the game was pretty terrible. The game play was extremely fast. Fast game play is often good in Atari 2600 games, but not in this one. The game play was WAY too fast. It is impossible to play the game five minutes straight without loosing at least all of your lives once. Replay value is also extremely low. The game always has a huge amount of frustration. But not the good type of frustration. The bad kind that makes you want to smash things. Maybe not the best type of frustration while playing near such a great system.

An easy review this was. Such a bad game this was. There aren't many games that I don't find at least somewhat entertaining on the Atari 2600, but this is one of the few. Graphics and sound are on its side, but that is not enough for me to give this waste of plastic a good grade.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/06