Arcade games coming to the Evercade was a really exciting development when it was first announced and after a few releases we’ve now got several arcade based collections. Toaplan Arcade Collection 1 was an exciting release a few months ago and now we have Toaplan Arcade Collection 2.
The games featured on this collection include Demon’s World, Fire Shark, Hellfire, Rally Bike, Twin Cobra, Twin Hawk and Wardner. If you have both Toaplan Collections and put them both into your Evercade VS home console you’ll be able to unlock an extra bonus game which is a console version of Twin Hawk.
If you’re an arcade fan, I’m sure there will be plenty you may like to dive into on this cartridge, but for me this was average at best. I didn’t know any of the games featured previously before getting the cart and having spent many hours going through them, I wasn’t overly won over by them.
I’ll go through each of the games presently to say some individual thoughts on them, but my issue with every single game is the same. Regardless of whatever game you play on this Collection if you get hit by an enemy once, it’s lose a life. For all the shooters on here, if you take one bullet to your aircraft it’s a life gone. No energy bar, no hit points, no chance.
This makes playing the games quite frustrating. I honestly can’t imagine trying to play any of these games back in the day on the actual arcade machines if this was the case. The machines would have been taking in coin nonstop if you wanted to complete any of the games.
Now, this being an arcade cart, you can insert as many virtual coins as you want by pressing the Select button. For some games you’ll restart back at a checkpoint, and with the steep difficulty level in some of the games this for me would mean I would never progress in these games. In other games you will find that even when you die the screen will continue to scroll and with each new life you will continue to make progress. These are the ones that are a better experience, but even still, the amount of times you’ll die because one hit kills is just crazy.
Fortunately, this being Evercade means that you’ll have the option to use save states and this was a godsend to make any progress at all through some games.
To be fair, Wardner, a platformer on the collection does have a Super Mario like system where you can pick up an item that works as another hit point. The other platformer Demon’s World does also have this, but maybe less so. To be honest, the platformers are probably the only games on the collection where an additional hit point would have been excusable to not have.
The worst offender for this one hit death situation is Rally Bike as you constantly crash in this game. Normally in a racing game if you bump into the side or another vehicle you get slowed down, or maybe take some damage which will slow you down and if you crash too many times you may eventually get a game over screen. In Rally Bike it’s just straight away.
Anyway, I’ve said about the one hit lose a life situation enough, now let’s look at what else there is to these games.
Demon’s World
Demon’s World is a platformer which has graphics that look like good Master System or early Mega Drive graphics. You play as a blonde guy with sunglasses on and the levels continually scroll and you jump about and shoot the flurry of enemies that come at you.
Weirdly the jump animation for the little dude is odd as he does a split legged jump every time. You can do a double jump, but this has fairly specific timing and if you don’t double jump early enough you won’t execute the double.
You can pick up various weapons which change how you shoot the various demons that populate the world. There are boss battles which are nice and meaty to get your teeth into. You can get occasional power ups that allow you more than one hit, but this game is let down by the one hit kill thing that I said I was done talking about…it just prevents this from being a lot more fun. Probably what makes it worse in this particular game is that the game continuously scrolls other than in the boss fights.
This makes it feel more like a 2D shooter game which is a problem on this Toaplan Collection. All but one of the games just continuously scroll. I guess you could stop your bike somewhat on the racing game, but in that case you do kinda want it to keep going.
Fire Shark
Next up we have Fire Shark which is one of the better shoot em ups on the cart. You fly a biplane and shoot at all manner of enemy vehicles such as planes, boats, ships, tanks and to be honest I could write the exact same thing about Twin Cobra and Twin Hawk on the cartridge. It’s a shame, but I truthfully struggle to tell these games apart and even having played them all to capture footage for the review, I’ve had to go back and play a few minutes of each to be able to tell them apart in my mind to write the review.
All the games have one action button for shooting your standard flurry of bullets and another to drop a big bomb. These are soooo essential. Fire Shark is one of the games that even when you lose a life or a credit the map will continue to scroll, so if you’re smart you can bypass a few enemies just waiting for it to scroll past them.
I was pleased that this game just respawns you where you were when you get shot otherwise this game would be impossible to get through. Those who love arcade shoot em ups will know there are more challenging games in the genre, but this one is still pretty relentless with the oncoming bullets in every direction.
Hellfire
Hellfire is one of the better looking games on this collection and is a side scrolling shoot em up which makes a nice change after all the vertical shooters in the collection. The sprites and nice and big, and although this isn’t as good as Truxton which I really enjoyed on Toaplan Collection 1, this is still a fine game in this second collection.
The unique thing on this game is that you can choose to change the direction of your bullets at will. Where as some shoot em ups will give you different power ups that add or change the direction of your shots, you can choose for bullets to go forward, back, up, down or diagonally and you’ll have to continuously change this to best fight certain enemies.
Rally Bike
I really didn’t like Rally Bike. This was the game on the cart which after a certain amount of play time I just threw up my hands and said ‘I’m out’. You bump into anything and it resets you back and you have to try again. And it’s not like you have ample space on the road.
It is cool that at times you can jump off ramps over trucks and as a vertically designed game, it’s nice to try in Tate mode on the EXP, but that’s probably as much nice stuff as I can say about this one.
Weirdly for a racer, you can run out of petrol as you go around. Now, if you saw my review of Piko Collection 3, this was also true of Radikal Bikers, so hey it does happen in games, but this game is so unforgiving with your ability to crash and burn at any second that trying to pick up fuel and dodge crashing felt nearly impossible.
There are pitstops which will fill you up as well, and you’ll see that if you attend one of these you get gas from a dude that kinda looks like the main hero from Demon’s World, but also does sorta look like a certain former president. He’s even wearing the red hat.
Twin Cobra
Twin Cobra is another vertical shoot em up and in it you control a helicopter and shoot all the usual tanks, boats etc. It’s nice that the screen can scroll off to the left and right if you fly that way and this shows you some extra areas you’d miss if you just let the game scroll vertically on its own.
My biggest tip for this game is that you should fly continuously around the edge of the screen in a clockwise direction and most of the enemy bullets will just continue to miss you. My other tip is that as soon as you respawn after getting shot use your bombs quickly to clear the area. As you’ll be chomping through tons of credits very fast you’ll soon realise that you may as well use your bombs quickly or else you’re more likely than not just gonna get hit and miss the chance to use that live’s bomb. Of course, with each life you get new bombs, so there’s no real consequence to wasting one at a non optimal time anyway.
Twin Hawk
Twin Hawk feels older than the other shooters on the cart, but actually isn’t. The game doesn’t scroll to the sides and the sprites are generally smaller than the other games, although still nicely detailed. I found the game strangely addictive although I was trying to get through it mostly for the review rather than that I was truly enjoying it.
I really don’t know what more I can say about this one other than as I said it feels so similar to other games on this cart. It’s not wonderful, but if this kind of game is really your thing you’ll probably enjoy it. It feels like a bunch of other 2D scrolling vertical shoot em ups I’ve played and it doesn’t appeal to me as one of the best.
Now that I’ve given the game this glowing review, I should also touch upon that the 16-bit home version of Twin Hawk is actually available to play as a bonus game if you plug both Toaplan games into the Evercade VS. This version of the game is pretty much the exact same thing, although there are some graphical differences and it has a menu with a difficulty level setting and such like.
Wardner
Lastly we come to Wardner which is a good platform game, but not a great platform game. You go about levels and pick up items like cash to get upgrades that you can buy at the ends of levels. You can climb ladders and trees and the platforming is ok, but there are plenty of places where you need to jump just right to get the angle. Sometimes you’ll also feel there were cheap deaths such as climbing a ladder just to have a stone drop on your head.
I mean, how could you know that would happen there? I guess its an old school arcade game and expects you to learn every situation to know the levels inside and out, but that simply doesn’t fly these days. Especially when there are so many games to play on this cart alone, let alone on Evercade as a whole, and let alone that you probably have a bunch of systems and a huge backlog of games.
Still, Wardner is a typical platformer and is a fun game which I’d suggest you use save states on. Towards the end of the game it can be fairly unforgiving and timing jumps to leap over dancing flames or fight the dragon boss isn’t the easiest.
Conclusion
So in conclusion I reckon Toaplan Arcade Collection 2 is gonna be one for players who maybe knew these games back in the day or someone who absolutely loves their punishing arcade games from the 1980s. If this doesn’t describe you, I’d say this is one you can miss. If I didn’t review these games for the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube Channel and www.xstreamed .tv I’d probably regret owning this collection. That said, there is some fun to be had here, but the reward of getting through these games doesn’t equal the effort you’ll have to put in to get into them.
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