Akka Arrh review: Bombarding the brain

So this tower defence/shooter hybrid languished in the archives until its resurrection in 2022 as part of Atari’s 50th anniversary collection. Set alongside less abstract and more compelling originals in that compendium such as Asteroid and Centipede, Akka Arrh appeared to be not much more than a curiosity.

But British developer Jeff Minter – renowned for his Llamasoft arcade classics such as Tempest, not to mention his eccentric humour – saw something deeper. His remake for modern consoles last year resonated with reviewers but now comes the platform it probably deserved all along – VR.

The premise offers an interesting juxtaposition of sensory overload versus the need for player self-restraint. It puts you in control of a fixed but rotating gun turret defending a payload of pods in the centre of the screen.

Enemies drop in and swoop towards your base but the central gimmick here is that you can fire either a bomb or a bullet from your cursor. The blast zone of bombs can set off chain reactions from exploding enemies but firing more than one at a time cancels your score chain. Bullets are limited in number but are required to destroy certain hostiles.

Luck plays a sizeable part in terms of the blast zone chain reactions. But you need to carefully parse the densely populated playfield to choose when, where and what to fire. That’s easier said than done because, in typical Minter fashion, the screen pulses with colour, vectors and particles while the high-energy soundtrack frazzles your ears.

Much as the extra dimensions in VR elevated psychedelic flat-screen wigouts such as Rez and Tetris Effect, Akka Arrh’s bombards the brain even more inside the PSVR2 headset (the game has a non-VR mode too), with particles and effects bursting toward you. In contrast to other VR titles, though, Minter seems to favour a small-scale sense of presence. To me, it felt like sitting in a small darkened room rather than the cathedral-sized antics of the likes of Rez. It’s certainly more subtle but not necessarily as thrilling.

A generously proportioned tutorial gives you plenty of runway to get up to speed with the various twists such as power-ups and the attacks on your base’s basement. But after about level 9, the challenge really steps up and Akka Arrh becomes more about survival than chasing high scores.

If you’re a hardcore Minter devotee, you’ll enjoy that subliminal flow of reacting without thinking while unconsciously absorbing the quirky Llamasoft wit. Skilled players can reach the multiplier level of “Jesus and Mary Chain”, while a total noob might get stuck with a mocking taunt of “Sweet FA”.

Not everyone will warm to Akka Arrh’s ascending difficulty level but at a mere €20 for the mind melt of this PSVR2 version, it’s cheaper than hallucinogenic drugs and probably less risky too.