Atari Mania Review (Steam)

by Jim Smale · October 21, 2022

Join our Atari Mania Review as we go on a wild journey through videogame history, Atari Mania is a microgame collection wrapped in a hilarious retro-driven narrative of exploration and surprise. You play as the Caretaker of the Atari Vault, the storehouse of classic Atari games. One night, a dead pixel appears, and soon enough, all heck breaks loose!!

Atari Mania Review Pros:

Decent pixel art graphics.
730.67MB Download size.
Steam achievements.
Full controller support and the recommended way to play.
Graphics settings – display mode, CRT effect, Fish eye effect, and v – sync.
Mini-game gameplay.
The game mashes a series of games together randomly to create a mini-game.
Think Warioware Atari edition.
Simple controls.
Outside of the games, you play as a janitor in the Atari Museum and you need to do cleaning, collecting art, and box art.
Excellent soundtrack.
You get a short amount of time to do a mini-game.
Collect classic game covers and manuals that populate the museum but also have a seperate viewer.
Encounters with the evil Pixels is a ten-game scenario.
Health points are lost when you fail a mini-game, lose all of them, and it’s back to the start.
Can easily quit and restart a run.
Supports using a d-pad and/or the stick.
Game manuals have to be unlocked as a reward for finishing a mini-game run.
Find and use new equipment to aid you in moving around the museum.
If you fail the last mini-game you lose your life and go back to one spot to replay a game.
Arcade cabinets have their own unique string of mini-games.
Some truly fantastic experiences.
A lot of the mash-ups are dream matchups where you want more.
The final game is generally always the same.

Atari Mania Review Cons:

No way to rebind the controls.
Doesn’t have any colorblind settings.
You have literally seconds to learn and perfect a mini-game.
Ever so slight button lag and it’s not as responsive as it needs to be.
Had games repeat themselves a lot.
No difficulty options.
Doesn’t support any online modes or leaderboards.
Had the game lock up a lot and it usually happened when loading a new mini-game scenario.

Atari Mania:

Official website.

Developer: Illogika

Publisher: Atari

Store Links –

Steam

8/10

Graphics - 8/10
8/10

Sound - 8/10
6/10

Accessibility - 6/10
7/10

Length - 7/10
8/10

Fun Factor - 8/10

7.4/10

Summary

Atari Mania is such a good idea, I mean it’s Warioware Atari edition! Mini-game after mini-game where each run is a game mash-up that is randomized. I love the atmosphere of it all and the story is a really good one as you play a janitor who cleans the Atari museum. It’s all a perfect storm until you play it, the difficulty is not set so it is constantly spiking, and the controls… They recommend using a controller but it doesn’t matter because no matter what you use, the lag/delay is an absolute game killer, I lost track of the number of runs that got ruined by this. Atari Mania was so close to being THE nostalgia trip but it fell and fell in the most critical part, the controls and performance. Hopefully, it gets patched but at the moment I’m seriously bummed out by it.