Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol. 2 Review (Steam)

by Jim Smale · Published August 25, 2023 · Updated August 25, 2023

For this Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol. 2 Review, we play a collection of four well-regarded arcade shooter titles updated with modern features developed by Tatsujin, Bitwave Games, and Embracer Freemode. The collection comes packed with Fire Shark, Flying Shark, Slap Fight, and Hellfire with an array of quality-of-life improvements from quick save, practice mode, Steam Achievements, and more.

Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol. 2 Review Pros:

Decent graphics.
Download size –
- Fire shark – 3.05MB
- Flying Shark – 2.88MB
- Hellfire – 2.67MB
- Slap fight – 2.31MB
Steam achievements with two games having 20, and the others having 79 and 53.
Shmup gameplay collection.
Four games in the collection with each being a seperate Steam Library entry.
Graphics settings – view, scale, scanlines, fullscreen, and speed.
Hellfire has three versions – the newer single-player, the newer two-player, and the older one-player mode.
Three game region versions of Hellfire – USA, Japan, and Europe.
Can rebind controls for both the keyboard and the controller buttons.
A handful of difficulties include modifiers like when to earn lives, starting lives, and attracting sounds.
Proper arcade experience down to putting in digital coins.
Accessibility options for each game – auto fire, auto dodge, health, hit ox size, show hotbox, and rewind.
You can save and load when you want and set up quick saving and quick loading.
Record your gameplay option.
Audio settings – echo, reverb, low pass, frequency, high pass, order, frequency for high pass, and default.
Hellfire is a side-scrolling move anywhere around the screen Shmup.
Collect power-ups and upgrades for weapons in Hellfire.
Hellfire has a button to change the direction of your shots.
Border settings – overlay (off/tutorial/music visualizer/channel visualizer/stats), frame on/off, and choice of backdrop.
Practice mode is available in each game.
It’s a huge nostalgia trip.
The music in each game is Chiptune greatness.
A lot of love and work went into these titles.
You can rotate the screen and also change the size of it.
Some of the games have the game region/version represented by the original font work on the arcades.
Flying Shark is a rolling Shmup where you are going up the screen.
All the games have amazing sprite work and excellent animated backgrounds or backdrops.
Flying Shark is a world war time shooter where you can freely move around the screen.
Fire Shark plays and looks a lot like Flying Shark.
In Fire Shark when you die your power-ups bounce around the screen so you can re-collect them.
Slap Fight Again is a scrolling Shmup where you freely move around as you make your way up the screen.
In all games, you can change how the soundtrack works and which one is used.
Rewind works instantly in all games.
Save replays.

Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol. 2 Review Cons:

The tutorials are just border art.
A lot of cheap deaths with the enemy shooting you offscreen.
The games come down as four seperate entries in your library.
The screen settings never seem to stay saved so you have to configure them every time.
You don’t get any history or anything with the games.
In some of the games, it’s really hard to make out enemy projectiles.