"A blatantly bad Space Invaders cash in."

Overview- Mattel usually took the high road with their quality of games. Almost every game that they released was very original and usually very fun to play. It seems like Mattel gave into the temptation with Space Armada and decided that they needed to cash in as cheaply as possible with the Space Invaders craze by releasing their own stripped down choppy version lacking all of the refinement and polish that its source material had.

Game Play- If you haven't guessed, this game plays just like Space Invaders, only maybe on Valium. There are four rows of eight invaders that descend upon you. Yeah there's less of them this time around but they are much larger and have less room to move meaning that they descend quicker making the game play much harder though not better. Your base as well as the invaders move very sluggishly making the game very hard to control accurately. Your shots are also not terribly accurate and the collision detection is questionable. Many times I shot the edge of one invader and another was also hit killing both; others that I shot were clearly missed but they also died anyway. The mother ship also makes an appearance but it's too fast and the invaders are too large so it's really hard to hit it. The biggest insult to the game play comes with the fact that there's no two player option at all and no difficulty settings, just a practice mode and a regular mode. How much more lazy could you get Mattel?

Graphics- The graphics are much larger and more colorful than the Atari 2600 but they sacrificed detail for size and it really shows here because this game does not look like it belongs on the Intellivision, it looks like it came from a lesser capable console than the Atari 2600. The only thing Mattel did for this game is made the color of the screen border change colors each time a new round started up.

Audio- I wish I could say more about the audio in this game but there's not enough here to even give much of a comment on. The Intellivision is capable of some nice music clips and some rich and varied sound effects but any of the sound effects heard here sound like they came from an old dedicated Pong console.

Conclusion- By now you're really starting to think that this is one sorry excuse for a Space Invaders clone and you're right because it is. Mattel skimped on this big time. They could've at least added two player support and I could've raised my score a few points more. This version is worse than the Atari 5200 port of Space Invaders and about as bad as the Odyssey 2 and Arcadia 2001 versions so just stay away from this and play Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 if you need a fix.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/03/10

Game Release: Space Armada (US, 1981)