461st played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1982
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari
Back in time again, we’re grabbing one of our old shoot ’em ups to cross off some old games.
Gravitar comes from Atari’s stable and runs with what seems like vector graphics. Without any other reference, we’d go for Lunar Lander as something we’re looking at to compare with.
Our Thoughts
My notes describe this game as Asteroids or Lunar Lander combined with Scramble and having added missions. That’s pretty long, but it covers the basics.
The first screen of the game starts you on a star map with several planets at the edges. Using the Asteroids-like controls, you move to one of them and start a level there. They can be played in any order without any indication of differences in difficulty, differences that are present.
In each level, you then need to destroy several bases to blow up the planet. Doing this to all would get you to a new set of levels, although (as you’ve probably gathered from our gameplay skills) we never reached that.
The levels themselves look simple and are tricky to control, Asteroids style controls don’t really translate well anymore. Using them on the map makes more sense, but even there they have put in enemies, making it more than a level select – but with the real game only starting when you enter a level, it feels unnecessary.
Final Thoughts
It’s still a simple game, but Gravitar feels like it is moving in the right direction, introducing different levels and options to an idea that’s otherwise fairly simple to plenty predecessors. It just feels a bit too tricky to really get into at this point.