Tempest 4000

It feels like a dream come true, and I can’t imagine how exciting this is for the folks at Llamasoft. Sure, it could have benefited from some more bells and whistles, but Tempest 4000 is the real deal, a new version of a remarkable arcade classic that isn’t spoken of nearly as much as it deserves today.

Tempest 4000 is a defiant artifact that returns to life once a console generation. What would it be like if someone who made games for the VIC-20 in the early 80’s authored another game in 2018? How many programmers from that generation are still even in this line of work? An answer to these curiosities may seem like a precarious way to spend $30. Thankfully, as either a psychedelic wonderland or a classic arcade score chase, Tempest 4000 is full of eccentric support.

There's only so much to add to an addicting gameplay loop of shooting, warping and surviving. Tempest 4000 does enough for fans of the original game to scratch that itch of a solid arcade classic. At certain points you enter a great flow state the games like Tetris, Rez or Lumnies are often known for. These are the best moments of Tempest 4000; enjoying the colors, the music and most importantly the solid gameplay. The game is just as good as the original and best of all it never gets old.

So far, it all sounds good and it is, but one can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that nothing was done to enhance the game. The Dave Bowman stargate analogy cries out for a VR mode. Rez recently got one. So did Tetris. A VR Tempest experience is a logical progression for the game that wouldn’t fundamentally change the core nature of the game but it sure would enhance its trippiness.

The price is no doubt Atari’s doing but it makes recommending the game a lot harder than it used to be. And yet when the bad guys are falling like skittles, as you skid past one and quickly jump back to explode him and his cohorts, any qualifications about the game being too retro, too familiar, or too expensive fall away. But it is frustrating that the game’s most important talking point has become how much it costs and not how it plays.

Tempest 4000 is a love letter to fans of the original and Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, for everyone else, the game is a fun but hard to master, arcade-style, synth-heavy romp.