Atari 2600 Room of Doom Review
“Room of Doom” is an action shooter for the Atari 2600 in the style of Robotron and Smash TV. Brought to you by the clever folks at CommaVid (Mines of Minos). In the game, you are a guy who finds himself in a room that is surrounded by sharpshooters but don’t worry you are packing heat yourself. Suddenly, the walls shift and the shooters open fire at you. You need to dodge their bullets (which you can outrun! – Ed) and take them out. Not too hard, right? Well eventually the bullets will start bending in weird ways, and then they unleash monsters that will track you down, and they put objects in the level. Get hit by a bullet, monster, or touch on the of the objects and you will lose a guy. Take all the sharpshooters out and you move on to the next level.
While not as deep as “Mines of Minos”, Room of Doom is a pretty decent one-player shooter. The graphics are in the style of classic games like Berserk. The collision and aiming are pretty well programmed. In an interesting twist, you get more points for shots fired from further away, which is a nice test of skill. It is the type of flourish one can expect from CommaVid. To add extra cleverness, they even have a timer on the monsters that makes them more difficult as you play. So try to take out those shooters quick, or you will find yourself shooting invulnerable monsters and running a lot.
My only problem with the game is that it’s just not enough sometimes, even with its many variations, it is still the same shooters and monsters and objects (although some pixels change). A more exciting variation in the shooters or maybe some cover could have added hours of gameplay to the Room of Doom. Perhaps even elevating it to the level of Atari classic.
Still for the Atari 2600, this is a solid middle-of-the-road title, that will give you many hours of fun. I give it 3 out 5 stars.
