Centipede: Recharged

I came at Centipede: Recharged from the shooter side of things, curious whether Adamvision Studios actually built something with enough snap to hold attention past the first twenty minutes. Short version: they mostly did, but there are real trade-offs you should know before you commit. The core loop is pure fixed-shooter DNA. You sit at the bottom of a widescreen 16:9 field, your cannon fires upward, and centipede segments snake down from the top in the classic left-wall-to-right-wall pattern. Shoot a segment and it splits, leaves a mushroom obstacle behind, and the sub-segments accelerate. Scorpions scroll across mid-screen and poison those mushrooms, turning them into a slow-motion wall of doom if you let them pile up. Spiders drop in from the sides and, when killed, hand off power-ups: spread shot, rapid fire, explosive bullets, a railgun-style beam, a ghost effect that pushes centipedes back, and others. The power-up selection is the game's sharpest addition. The problem is the base gun is limited to one bullet on-screen at a time, which feels deliberately throttled. Miss a shot into a mushroom cluster and you sit there waiting for the bullet to travel its full arc before you can fire again. At speed, that sluggishness punishes you more than any design decision should in a twitch shooter. The power-ups fix this, but you are entirely dependent on spider RNG to get them, which introduces a frustrating luck factor, especially in the 30 challenge stages where specific drop types can mean the difference between a clean clear and an instant death spiral. The challenge stages are actually the more interesting content. Each one is a self-contained objective: destroy X enemies, survive Y seconds, clear mushrooms under a timer. They have their own leaderboards and push the mechanics in directions the endless arcade mode never reaches. If you are a score-chaser who likes competing against a small, consistent player pool, this is where Recharged has legs. The arcade mode's global leaderboard is fine, but without difficulty settings or a lives system, a single stray scorpion mushroom or unlucky spider skip ends your run cold. One hit, game over. It is authentic to the 1981 source material and it will absolutely annoy you. On the presentation side: the neon vector aesthetic works. Everything glows, particles fly on every kill, and the background palette cycles through color shifts as your score climbs, which is a clean piece of feedback design. Composer Megan McDuffee's original soundtrack keeps energy up. Where critics and players pushed back is on the audio side more broadly: the original Centipede's insect sound effects were functional cues as much as atmosphere, and Recharged trades them for a synth score that sounds good but removes the audio tells that let experienced players track threats by ear. For a shooter where positional awareness matters, that is a meaningful omission. Local co-op is available across both arcade mode and all 30 challenges, and it is probably the game's best angle: two players, shared chaos, split-second power-up decisions. There is no online co-op, and no online versus, which feels like a missed opportunity for a score-attack title. Controllers are the right input here. The original Centipede ran on a trackball, and Recharged unfortunately ships without mouse or trackball support on PC, which some retro fans found baffling and a number of early Steam users flagged as a launch issue. Gamepad play is smooth enough, though the single-bullet constraint still stings regardless of how good your hardware is. If you want a 30-minute arcade hit between longer sessions, Recharged delivers without friction. If you want progression, ranked depth, or anything beyond two modes and a leaderboard, look elsewhere. The honest ceiling here is a very good score-attack game with a thin content layer around it. Fred, Scout Team