I could start this review off with a little intro paragraph teasing whether the game is good or bad, but this game doesn’t deserve it. I’ll just cut right to the chase - Campaign ‘84 is absolutely terrible. It starts out innocent enough making you believe that you’re about to play a humorous simulation of an election...Then the game horribly veers when it asks you to choose a donkey or an elephant. From that point on, you’ll be playing one of the most tedious, awful games I’ve ever played.
Ever want to navigate a maze where the walls are invisible and your goal isn’t escape, but rather to catch good fortune in the shape of a bowling ball-type thing and avoid bad fortune in the shape of a megaphone-type thing? Nor did I, friend. But I found myself doing that in Campaign ‘84. Navigating this invisible maze can be frustrating enough, since there’s several times you’ll get stuck on a wall. It doesn’t mean that you can’t go in that direction, it just means that you’re caught on the wall and once you wiggle free and try again, you’ll likely get through. This wouldn’t be so bad if the walls weren’t invisible...But since they are, you can never tell if you’re actually at a wall, or if you got yourself glued to the edge or corner of the walkway.
Oh, and it gets even worse. As I stated in the paragraph above, you want to catch good fortune and avoid bad fortune. Well, catching good fortune helps your campaign...Which is fine and dandy except that it also increases your campaign hours. The game keeps going and going if you increase your campaign hours....Which might not be so bad if they tossed more of the simulation stuff in, but you don’t get that. All you get is the invisible maze. This maze is not fun to navigate through for more than three minutes let alone thirty. Also, when you get the fortunes, you’ll get slogans telling you what you got or what you lost. They can be somewhat clever...But there aren’t many of them, so expect to read the same ones over and over and over again.
Campaign ‘84's graphics definitely match the gameplay; poor. Much like the gameplay, it starts out kind of promising with a neat little title screen, but it goes downhill once the game begins. If this game was on the Atari 2600, I would rip it apart on how bad the graphics are...But this game is on the Colecovision, a system with much more graphical power. There’s absolutely no excuse for the poor graphics...Unless they used up all the space in the cartridge to create that absolutely awful invisible maze. In which case, I still won’t accept the graphical blunder. The audio is a little better, though. There’s background music and sound effects, which act as really poor bodyguards that try to block boredom from entering your mind – it does its job for a minute or two, but ultimately fails. In all fairness, though, the audio isn’t terrible...but it’s overshadowed by the failures of the rest of the game.
Campaign ‘84 is an absolute mess. The game concept is awful, the gameplay is awful, the graphics are awful, and I feel awful for spending so much time playing it for this review. Maybe if the campaign hour timer wasn’t effected by the good fortunes, the game would be more tolerable since you could see an end in sight...But when you’ve racked up two thousand seconds of campaign time (and just by standing still, chances are that you'll add more here and there) the pain looks to never have an end until you hit the power switch on your Colecovision...Which is what I recommend doing immediately once you see that inital title screen. - Ape
1983
