Cloak & Dagger (Arcade)
The arcade game Cloak & Dagger is in some ways a movie tie-in game, but at the same time, the unusual circumstances to how it connects to the 1984 film Cloak & Dagger means it in no way attempts to adapt the events of the movie. That is because the Universal Pictures film and Atari video game were initially being developed independently until a plot point involving an Atari 5200 game lead to a serendipitous intersection. The game Agent X would be renamed to better line up with the spy film, but despite appearing as an Atari 5200 title in the movie that contained the secret plans for an invisible jet bomber once a certain score was reached, Cloak & Dagger would never make it to that console. Even the footage in the film ended up having to come from the arcade game since it was the only version released and the game decided to focus in on its own ideas rather than copying the film’s narrative about a young boy chased through San Antonio, Texas by spies out to kill him to get their hands on the plans.
The Cloak & Dagger video game instead focuses on Agent X as he infiltrates the subterranean bomb factory run by Dr. Boom. Each of the 33 floors of the facility Agent X must cross in an effort to steal back a set of top secret plans has a giant explosive sitting in the middle, essentially adding a timer to every level in this twin stick shooter. Technically you only ever need to cross the entire single screen floor to make your way deeper into the base, but every few floors a minefield presents a more dangerous challenge as the floor is littered with mines you can only see in brief flashes. The bomb in the middle’s fuse will eventually ignite on its own, meaning you can’t always find the time to feel out where the mines are before the floor goes up in flames and takes you with it, so on the previous floors the player will want to grab map pieces that show a safe way to the exit.
Many floors in Cloak & Dagger are actually incredibly busy with a lot of moving objects on screen, the game’s ancestry as a potential game conversion for Robotron: 2084 cabinets a bit clear as that game similarly packed its single screen levels to the gills with objects and enemies. Most of the visual clutter in Cloak & Dagger though actually comes in the form of green unarmed explosives that ride conveyor belts all about the level. Many levels would be a lot more legible if there weren’t so many green harmless explosives riding about serving mostly as a way to earn some points if you walk over them, but these conveyor belts can carry true dangers and important items as well. Map pieces and extra lives will ride along beside dangerous red explosives, but Agent X’s gun can safely dispose of active explosives with a single shot. Being able to fire rapidly and in eight directions using one of the joysticks means that you can clear away any real obstacles on the conveyors, but the harmless green explosives can block shots too so you have to sometimes blast a lot of objects to eliminate threats.
Where these packed conveyor belts probably pose more of a danger though is in how they assist the enemies lurking around Dr. Boom’s lair. Your most common opponent seems to be some sort of robot that fires arrows at you, these arrows flying over explosives while the robots can move around safely behind the cover of the busy conveyor belts. While all 33 floors have consistent unique designs, these robots can appear in different spots when a level if replayed or after a death, meaning sometimes you can find the robots easy pickings or they might get the drop on you right as you arrive on the floor. Trying to spot where every robot is and dodging their arrows is where most of Cloak & Dagger’s difficulty comes from, the player needing to make quick sense of everything on screen and then swiftly dispense with any dangers, grab the map piece, and scurry to the exit before the bomb goes off. Later though, forklifts are added to the question, these not gelling as well with the need to take in a level at a glance. A shot that hits a forklift will reflect back at you, and while they are meant to prevent the player from firing wildly and hoping to hit something, already the danger enemies present feel like they’d motivate you to be accurate and look where you fire just to avoid being hit first yourself. Instead, your attempts to deal with the chaos can be curtailed because a forklift drives into the path of your weapon, leading to a death you might not have even seen coming since you had to look so many other places at the same time.
Most floors will be built around conveyor belt layouts, but there are occasional cave levels where you’ll often be asked to break your way through obstructing walls using weapon fire. These floors are also where you’ll start to encounter a new enemy type, giant eyes sending out a single long beam from their eye to try and kill you. The beam needs time to extend outwards and adjust its angle and your own shots help shorten it, but while you can sometimes sprint past the regular robots, these giant cyclopes will likely zap you if you don’t take care of any close to your intended escape route. These do feel like a reasonable complication though, the game ensuring that more floors will likely come down to the wire as you can’t quite so easily cross the stage, and these eyes can even start impacting the way minefield floors are handled because they delay you too much and make feeling your way through them without a map almost impossible.
As for why you might want to head to a minefield floor without all the necessary map pieces, that comes down to the elevator system at play. After clearing a floor, you take the elevator down to the next one, usually getting to see a decent animation of Agent X cooling off for a second or getting hassled by some elevator gizmo before he pops back into the action. However, if you’re feeling bold, you can hold down the joysticks and skip a few floors, the game letting you go as far as the next minefield with this method. Since the minefield floors are consistent in design, you can pop into Cloak & Dagger after a game over and potentially speed up your progress by tackling a minefield by memory. In fact, continuing after a loss will even let you start from certain benchmark floors, the player still needing to reach them before continuing but it does make Cloak & Dagger more accessible and thus more interesting. You won’t have to repeat too many familiar floors so long as you can reach the minefield benchmarks and clear them and you can try your luck with skipping floors if you want to have your extra life reserves intact for future levels. Skipping floors can come back to bite you though, as Cloak & Dagger doesn’t end when you reach the bottom floor of Dr. Boom’s lair.
To truly complete Cloak & Dagger, you’ll need to escape the way you came in with plans in hand. Already every level can be entered from the right or left to accommodate the elevator skipping function so going back up through the facility won’t really feel too different from your first time through the stages, but there is one element that can change quite dramatically. The giant bombs in the middle of a room are meant to blow up as you go, the player even able to ignite the fuse with a special button to try and earn bonus points for escaping the floor in just the nick of time. On floors where the bomb did detonate, now a crater will be left behind, some unusual electrical enemies known as Node Monsters flying out of it and requiring three shots to take down. You don’t have to worry about a time pressure at least, but the Node Monsters are a suitably difficult substitute to deal with, but things are even harder if a floor didn’t have its bomb go off on your way down. Agent X will instead have to worry about a Superguard who comes off the elevator after him that proves a more determined threat than the Node Monsters who move around with less direction. Perhaps a more important detail is that continuing during the ascent will instead require you to snag the plans again and start from the bottom, and while extra lives are more plentiful going back up, it’s still no easy feat to actually clear all 33 stages twice over. There is still some entertainment to be found in trying to snag the plans in the first place with the escape feeling more like a tough challenge for the most devoted of players, but it does become easy to grow frustrated with the visual noise when it can more definitively upset a run going up than when there were barriers in place to help you keep going when heading down deeper into the base.
THE VERDICT: Cloak & Dagger has a good set of ideas in place to make the descent down into Dr. Boom’s bomb factory a bit exciting. An explosive timer, mild enemy placement randomization, and having more unique floors like the caves and minefields keep Cloak & Dagger varied while the elevator system and floor benchmarks encourage the player to keep pushing deeper into the game without getting discouraged. The conveyor belts packed with little objects do become a bit obnoxious with how much they clutter the screen and they make the base escape a bit less appealing to commit to, but Cloak & Dagger’s quick action still makes it a decent arcade spy thriller fit for the kind of player who wants a bit of longevity out of the content a cabinet offers.
And so, I give Cloak & Dagger for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. The bomb time limit found on every floor going down feels like it was the right kind of motivator to keep you moving and aiming intelligently in Cloak & Dagger, but ideas like the forklifts do start to turn the chaotic visuals into more of an issue. Needing to quickly take in a level’s layout and dangers at a glance is where the action works well, the player sometimes having to decide if they’ll go for things like extra lives or even map pieces when it might be wiser to just sprint to an exit to avoid the risks present. When things get more dangerous like when the large eyes come in and those pesky reflective forklifts though, it starts to become more likely you’ll be bugged by the mild randomness in enemy positioning and how you can’t always keep track of everything on screen. The ascent back up ends up feeling like a tougher trial rather than a victory lap because Node Monsters and the Superguard can push these problems a bit further, but Cloak & Dagger never gets so chaotic that you’re not able to make sense of what’s on screen. Whether you can react to an incoming arrow whose appearance was obscured by far too many explosives on conveyor belts though is another matter, but things still can feel manageable if hectic for much of the adventure, especially with levels shifting to the minefield or cave layouts often enough that the game never feels it has to get absurd with the visual clutter. Cleaning up the conveyor belts feels like it would be a step in the right direction, the green inactive explosives not feeling too necessary even in their role as a temporary barrier to protect the robots. There are already treasure items sometimes on the belts that provide temporary boosts but they’re hardly felt and easily destroyed, but more helpful treasures and the red explosives could have been decent barriers and the movement of the belts can already impede your efforts to dash towards exits. More legible level layouts can still pack a punch in the game already through smart placement of threats and things to grab, so perhaps instead just trimming down the number of chaotic stages could help even things out since there are already levels where over 50 objects can be moving around before you even factor in enemies and hazards.
It’s not very likely Cloak & Dagger would have done much better had it hit the Atari 5200 as depicted in the film and the movie seems to mostly have a legacy as a nostalgic favorite of kids born in that time period, but the arcade game does still have enough moments where its variables come together nicely that you’ll likely tolerate the more chaotic floors to continue your plunge deeper into the bomb factory. It might have been better off not including the return trip or at least it could have continued trying to keep you hooked by adding checkpoints to the escape process as well, but Cloak & Dagger likes to overindulge and that can sometimes lead to exciting hectic action on floors where that maximalist approach doesn’t get too out of hand.