‘Midway Arcade’ Mobile Game Review

Imagine you could step into a time machine and revisit all your favorite moments. Pretty cool so far, right? Only this time machine doesn’t let you walk around and enjoy yourself — it keeps you locked inside the clunky device, forced to peek out through a muddy, distorted window. When you try to relive your glory days, you end up screwing them up and ruining all your memories.

That time machine exists, and it’s called ‘Midway Arcade.‘ We salute Warner Bros. Interactive for resurrecting the defunct developer’s old slate of treasures to introduce them to new gamers, but deplore the execution. The likes of Rampage, Joust, Arch Rivals and Spy Hunter aren’t so hot when you’re squinting to make out dated graphics and fumbling to replicate your well-honed skills with touchscreen controls that seem actively geared to make you look like an idiot.

The app starts you off with 10 classics and unlocks more in pay-to-play downloadable packs. Even if you’re harboring a longstanding crush on Gauntlet, APB or Total Carnage, we can’t recommend picking them up in this form.

Not only do the games look muddier than we remember, the act of even loading them up is a chore, thanks to a poorly designed interface that makes you wonder if your device has frozen before it eventually decides it’s time to let you play.

If WB takes another stab at resurrecting Midway’s games, we hope it remakes them, adapting them to the strengths of the platform rather than shoehorning them into control schemes that don’t work. Otherwise we’d just as soon skip the next time machine ride.

RATING: 4/10

‘Midway Arcade’ ($0.99), available on iOS platforms, was published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. For this review, we played the game for two hours on an iPod Touch.