Toaplan Arcade Collection Vol.1 Review

Toaplan Arcade Collection Volume 1 is a collection of classic shoot’em up, or shmups, originally between the mid and late 80s for the arcades. Toaplan’s success all began in 1985 with Tiger-Heli and helped them establish themselves as a credible game developer in the shmup genre. This collection will give a second life to some lesser known titles.

The collection contains:

• Flying Shark
• Fire Shark
• Tiger Heli
• Twin Cobra / Kyukoku Tiger
• Out Zone
• Fix Eight
• Batsugun
• Dogyuun

Akin to any other game in the genre, you’ll also benefit from various power-ups that will give a bit of leg up in order to survive the bullet hells. While for flying games it’s pretty simply and straight forward, it becomes a bit more challenging for the walking shumps as you cannot shoot in all directions/strafe adding a layer of difficulty.

Thankfully, if you struggle, given these are arcade ports, you can refill your credits at will and play until you can clear them. For the masochists, you can speed up the action, but on the flipside, if you’re struggling, you can slow it down as well to properly see everything coming your way. And there’s also a rewind options if you screw up.

You can also save your game at any time; so it’s quite useful if you have other things to do and if you die; you can pick up right before you die and play differently to progress further. While the genre is usually pretty simple, you can add tutorial-like borders to get a better grasp of what each power up pick up does. Controls are also customizable to your playstyle.

The games look great; they look like their original arcade counterparts; for some people it might be archaic, but for others, it’ll be a nice throwback to a time where things were simpler and didn’t need any overly complex visuals to enjoy a game. The developers also threw in a few options where you can either apply a variety of filters or even stretch the screen. The audio is also on point; which is both a good and bad thing as you’ll be reminded of some static from back in the day. Much like the visuals, the audio can also be slightly customized with echoes, filters, and reverb.

There’s nothing inherently wrong here. Albeit, as some of you may know, the shmup genre is one of the hardest out there and theses classics will test your metal with projectiles and enemies coming from all angles. Admittedly, in the walking shmups, it does feel a bit archaic not being able to change your direction and shoot in any direction.

Toaplan Arcade Collection Vol.1 is a fascinating look into the past of some lesser known arcade games. There’s a decent variety of games and whether you’re a fan of genre or looking to dip your toes, this collection is a great game. For those familiar with the genre, this package offers a nice challenge whilst for newcomers, thanks to the QoL improvements such as rewind and save states, it lends you a hand to get through it. Solid gameplay and tight controls. There’s a lot of bang for your buck here and it’s worth every penny.